WS2017 Game-Changing Steps for Outsourcing a Remote Team in the Philippines with John Jonas

I'm very driven by freedom. I'm driven by financial freedom, but I'm also driven by time freedom. And so anything I'm spending my time on that, I think I could teach someone else to do. Well, I should probably teach someone else to do it. When you become the CEO, things start to change. Your income is no longer limited.

This is your real estate syndication show. I'm your host, Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is John Jonas. He's a founder of onlinejobs ph and he had a former, former job for eight months after college and quick quickly met his goal to quit that job and work from home for himself and has made six, seven figures since then. He's hired, he hired his first Filipino two years later in 2006 and knew he was on to something special. This was an extraordinary relationship structure with great potential and it still remains to this day. So he's the author of the Outsourcing Lever and creator of one VA way.com he's Christian, husband, father. You're going to hear many things today about his background. But, but what you are going to learn today is, is how to outsource so many things and ultimately gain time back by hiring people who are specialists, things that you need. John, welcome to the show. Honored to have you on. I've actually been using your services for a while now, your website that you've created and, and I looking forward to diving in. So the listeners, whether they are passive investors or whether they're active, I, I, I'm positive that they can gain a lot by learning about what you do in this website and ultimately people that can help them in ways that I bet they've not. So welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Before we jump in, tell us what onlinejobs PH is and then we'll jump into a little bit of your backstory and really how the listeners can utilize this to help themselves.

So Online Jobs is a job board for finding virtual workers in the Philippines. So it's kind of like indeed.com but just for the Philippines. So about 48% of our customers are in the US and then they're, you know, in the UK and Canada and Australia and France and South Africa and Brazil and whatever employers around the world looking to hire someone, a virtual person, virtual help. So a copywriter, a social media marketer, a content writer, SEO programmer, data entry, just an assistant, whatever, all of these, any, any of this stuff you can find someone in the Philippines. And it's their, they're super good at the work that they do, they are talented, they're honest. So I mean this is, it's a way to connect. It's just a job board. You post a job and the people in the Philippines will apply to the job and then you hire who you want. We don't act as a middleman, we don't take a cut of their salary. We don't mark up salaries, you just pay them. And I wanted to find in the Philippines for hiring people. And so that's what I made. That's what I made for myself initially and then, yeah, now it's available to everyone.

Awesome. Well, I want us to get into that and the website and the types of tasks that most likely can be found. You know, you can help with that. Often the listener hasn't thought of. Before we do that, you know, let's. I want to back up just a little bit in your story. What was the pivotal moment for you, John, that you know, said, you know, I realize there's like potential here with outsourcing specifically, not so much building the website yet, but like there's, there's potential to outsource some of these things that I'm doing. And here's a good way or a good, you know, even, you know, place in the Philippines to get this help.

That moment happened multiple times. So the first time it happened, I had tried hiring someone multiple different ways. I tried hiring local people and it just didn't work out. And I tried that four times. And it was also like, you know, I was new and that help was expensive and it was just questionable. It was like right on the edge of is this worth it or not? Right? And when they quit, that just made it so rough. I tried hiring people in India, that was really rough. And I won't go into it, but it's just harder. I tried hiring people off of upwork. It was actually elance at the time. Now it's upwork. And I thought that was it. I found it. This is amazing. Only to realize later that this is purposefully temporary short term work. I mean, they talk about, oh, you can make it long term, but that's not how the incentive system of upwork works. The incentive system is to do short term work. And it was really hard for me because as a small business owner that just guaranteed 100% turnover. And that was like, oh man. I got some really good advice from someone who told me, when you're ready to start hiring for some of the stuff you're doing, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I never considered that. And he gave me a reference where I could hire someone and I didn't do it because the reference was a full time person. It was through an agency. I was going to pay them $750 a month and they were going to give me a full time person and I had to keep someone busy full time. And I just didn't think, I didn't think they could do enough. I didn't think they could do good work. I didn't know if I could keep them busy full time. I didn't know I could afford it. This is 2004. It took me a couple months and finally I was like, it doesn't really matter, I have to take the leap. And I hired this guy and it was the single most liberating experience of my life. His full time job was to do anything I asked him to do and he really didn't know anything. I mean, now it's super easy to hire someone who's super talented, but at the time it was really, really difficult. So he didn't really know anything. I just had to teach him everything. But anything I was willing to teach him, he was willing to do. And he was willing to do it full time or do it for a few hours and do something else and do something else, which is what ended up happening. And I. So the first time this life changing moment happened for me, I had taught him how to write articles and how to post them on websites and how to, how to get links on those websites to my websites for SEO. This is what I was doing at the time and I had tried doing this elsewhere. I tried doing this, this is what I tried doing on Elance and it just didn't work. And the first time he did it correctly it was like, oh my gosh, there are two of me now. Which is he's doing what I was previously trying to do. And I just hated my life for doing it because I hate doing it and he's doing it and he's happy to do it and maybe he likes it or not, I don't really, I don't know, but he's doing it. That was really the first life changer was, yeah, I just replaced myself with for the first time ever. And I did it again and again and again and like three times with him in different things that I was trying to do. And then I hired someone else and was like, oh yeah, I can, I can get someone else to do the things that I'm. That I'm struggling to do or that I'm doing so I can focus on more important things. So I'm not focusing on $8 an hour tasks so I can focus on high level tasks.

Speak to even what you just said because I think it's very difficult for a lot of us to figure out hey, what am I doing that somebody else could do? How did you determine the $8 task versus $100 or $1,000 hour task right. That early took John to do versus being able to give it to somebody else.

So I have kind of a different perspective on this. I'm very driven by freedom. I'm driven by financial freedom, but I'm also driven by time freedom. There definitely are thousand dollar an hour tasks and there are eight dollar an hour tasks, but really there's just time. And so anything I'm spending my time on that I think I could teach someone else to do. Well, I should probably teach someone else to do it because maybe they don't do it exactly how I would do it. Maybe they don't do it exactly as well as I would do it. But it's all about time. And if I'm not doing it and it's still getting done well, 90% is usually 90% in my experience is almost just as good as 100% in almost every case. Right. So if they're doing it at 90% of what I would do it and.

You didn't have to do it, that's amazing.

It's such a big deal. And so for me, I started off by hiring someone to do the article writing thing that I was doing. Right. This is marketing. And then I taught him SEO and so he's doing SEO stuff that I was doing and he's doing ads like Google Ads that I had been doing. And so I taught all these things and there's ways of teaching people these things now. And you can also hire individual people to do all each of these things. Whatever. The big one was when I. So I graduated from College of Computer Science and I was a programmer and I hired a programmer at some point and that was really life changing because that was my thing. Right? That was. No, I'm the, I'm the really good programmer. It turned out the programmer I hired was better than me and, and that.

Was the end of it.

Like I was no longer a programmer. I was, I was kind of the CEO and wow, what a transition that was for me where I'm a programmer, I'm a programmer, I'm a programmer. I guess I have to figure out how to be a CEO A programmer's income is very limited. In almost every profession, the income is limited, there's a cap. But when you become the CEO, things start to change. You know, you can. Your income is no longer limited.

Yeah, it's no longer limited. Love that thought process there. And I guess before we, we jump on in, I think there's so many things around, around this process that I want to open the eyes of the listener to. But you know, before we do that, give us just some of the, maybe the unconventional, say, tasks, the things that you're able to hand off to somebody like this that maybe aren't thought of often. Oftentimes we think of maybe some of the social media stuff or email or calendar, you know, organization, things like that. But what are some other things that are maybe are often not discussed that you found personally or with other people that, you know, they've just really moved the needle for them personally by handing these things off as well.

Let me define something in this, because this should change. This should, this should help people understand these tasks. We call them virtual assistants. We think of an executive assistant. We think of a personal assistant. We think of an assistant. An assistant is a secretary. And they can only do data entry. At least that's what most people think of when they hear virtual assistant. They can only do data entry. Oh, they can only do basic menial tasks. They can only follow exact instructions. And that's not who I hire. And that's not who you want to hire. And so years ago I stopped calling them virtual assistants because that's not what it is. And I'm hiring these specialists who are really, really good at all kinds of different things. And I'm going to talk about that to answer your question. So rather than calling them virtual assistants, I call them online Filipino specialists. They work online. They're in the Philippines and we can talk about why the Philippines specifically. And they're specialists. So like specialists at SEO. I recently hired multiple SEO specialists or social media specialists or programmers who are really, really good. Or a system admin who manages the servers and the security of what we're doing, or someone who specializes, who's really, really good at making Google Docs spreadsheets, right? Like really, really good at putting data together in these spreadsheets. That's not a data entry person, right? Or someone who is really knowledgeable at researching real estate deals or like following through on. Following through with contractors, or someone who can do bookkeeping. Someone, someone who's really experienced with Xero or QuickBooks and they, they're following the invoices and they're following up with people and they're like, you can find specialists who are really good at all these things. You can also find a general virtual assistant and who knows multiple of these things. And you can teach others.

Right.

Some of the things that you wouldn't think about. So I had, I had a guy contact me one time. He said he had gotten a part time job knowing that he wasn't going to do the job, he was just going to hire someone in the Philippines to do the job. Right. So he's working in the US and just sending all the work to the Philippines. I have a friend who contacts me one day and says, John, I just hired this guy. Actually it wasn't just, he had hired this guy a couple months before in the Philippines from my website. And he says this, he's an investment banking analyst. So this guy's a $250,000 a year person in the U.S. this is 10 years ago, $250,000 a year person in the U.S. he's paying $1500 a month for in the Philippines. Right. Crazy. And he's like, this guy is so good, he knows what he's doing. You can find bankers, you can find. So email, you talked about email being like the one you assume is like, okay, but I have someone respond to my email as if they're me. And that took some time to go through, but they respond like me in my personal email, which so many people are like, oh, I don't know if I could trust someone to do that. Yeah, you don't know if you could trust someone to do it. You have to try it first and see do I trust this person? And it's pretty easy to figure out in the Philippines how quickly you do or do not trust them. So people will typically think about like cold calling. You want to have someone doing cold calling. Outreach, super doable or lead generation is super doable. You know you're going to teach someone, hey, go on LinkedIn and look for this kind of person and contact them. And, and then that response, the response from that person is going to come straight to you rather than going to the person in the Philippines. Right. So then you're, they're doing the initial legwork and you're, then you have these leads that are coming to you.

Right? Yeah, no, that's, it's some great thoughts. I just trying to help the listener to think through this. I mean, we've hired, I mean probably, I don't know, but just do online jobs? Ph, I don't know, 20 or 30 different of s, you know, over the last number of years. But for us personally, it's been mostly marketing. You know, podcast editing, video, audio editing, copywriting, even all the posting. You know, I had a manager, you know, of all that at one time as well. And yeah, we're just. They're very hardworking and very dependable. There's been very few where I was like, I don't think you're probably a good fit. You know, I mean, and for the most part, I mean, they, they did seem very trustworthy up front and so. But I would imagine that. Would you say the marketing piece is more of the common hire or there are other, you know, what's. What have you seen?

It's all over the board. So I talk about the marketing piece because so many people are interested in that. We have a bunch of admins, admin people. Not, not like secretarial admin, but data admin or customer support or backend management of things. I know. So I have, I have like multiple neighbors around me now that I talk about. So one guy, he buys pallet auctions their surplus things or their lost mail items. And all he does is take pictures of these things and then he hired someone in the Philippines off my website. And she looks them up and makes the listing on ebay and Poshmark and wherever else so that those things get sold. She manages the sales of them and she prepares the shipping of it all. She does all of it. All he does is take pictures of these things that he buys.

Right.

And then she does all the rest. And then one of his kids ships it when she sends them a label. Right. The things you can do, it's like anything that can be done online or on a computer. You can have someone in the Philippines to do it and you can hire someone who's good at it or you can teach someone to do it. Right. And then they're going to do it your way or both. You hire someone who's good at it and you teach them?

Yeah, I would say the 95, maybe all but one or two of the hires that I made all had a skill that I didn't have.

Right.

Like, I mean, that's, that's why we needed them. Right. I mean they. And then some others, you know, that I did teach them skills, you know, that I wanted things I wanted them to do. But, but let's talk about the hiring process a little bit. We'd love your just thoughts on, you know, just key things to look at. Right. Or maybe questions to ask. And obviously, you know, we're, you know, we're in another country, another time zone, those things. But what are some things that, that you need to make sure you're asking these questions to get, you know, the right hire.

I'm going to give a quick overview of how I hire. I cover this in detail@1vaway.com I hire great people and this is my process for, I mean, you know, I've hired probably 50 people. I have 40 that work for me because I very rarely let someone go. Here's what I do. So my first thing is I will go to online jobs. Ph. And I search the skill I'm looking for. You're looking for a real estate investor. Right. So you can search real estate investing or investor, search it and see what comes up. You're going to look at profiles and the goal here is two things to see what skills exist and then the second thing is to see how much are people looking to make. So you're going to look at 10 or 20 of them and you're going to be like oh my gosh, wow, I can hire some really talented people. I want to hire that person. I want to hire that person. I want to hire that person. And that's the wrong way to go about it. So saying oh no, that's the person I'm going to hire. Because online jobs is, it's a, it's a profile. It's kind of like you putting your profile onto Indeed.com as an, as an employee. Right. That person may already have a job. And one of the great things about the Philippines is they're so loyal that if they already have a job, chances of them responding to your inquiry is not great because they're loyal to their employer which is great once you've hired someone.

Right.

So I'm going to look at things and then at that point I'm going to go post a job. And when I post a job actually so I have two things going on here. I'm posting a job and people are going to apply. However, the more specialized I find the job is like the more specialized the skills are, the less I can rely on a job post. And so I will post a job. But if it's a really specialized thing, I'm looking for a really high end person. The more I find I have to actively contact people. So I have to go on onlinejobs. Ph, you have to upgrade to do this and you find your searching profiles and I'm just going to use the contact button on people's profiles and say, hey, I'm looking for someone to do this. Are you interested? Because again, you know, if they already have a job, they may not respond to you or they may not be interested or, you know, whatever it is. So I'm going to contact 10 people, 10, maybe 20 people, whatever, and then I'm going to wait and see who get, who responds, who applies to my job post and who responds to my inquiry at this point. So you have a bunch of leads of people you can hire. Now I'm going to ask them a bunch of questions across a bunch of emails. There's not something specific that you need to ask. I have a list of questions to ask that's available for free at online jobs or at one VAOA. And that list is there's like 100 questions that you can ask. I don't really care what you ask. The point here is to ask a lot of questions across a bunch of emails. So I'll send an email with 2, 3, 4 questions, and when they respond, I'll send another email with two, three, four questions. And I'll do this over and over and over again. And the point here is, if I send them four questions and they only answer three of them, I know their attention to detail isn't great to be in a virtual relationship. It doesn't really work in most positions. If I send them an email and they take three days to respond, then I know that once I hire them, they're probably going to take three days to respond to me. And that really doesn't work in a virtual relationship where like, oh, I have no idea if you're actually working or not. Right. So this process tells you, gives you a really good indication of how a. How they're going to work virtually with you. A couple things, when I. Let me go back, take a step back. When I post my job, I usually do two things. I usually require them to make the subject of their application or the title of their application a specific thing. So it'll be like Real Estate investing, dash your name here. Right. I'll put that in my job description. I want you to apply with Real Estate Investing, dash your name. And then the second thing, and this is something recently that I've started doing, is I require people to use a certain number of apply points. So apply points, you can, you can figure this out in all my jobs, I mean, we all explain this, but require people to use a specific number of apply points. Somewhere between 3 and 10. You'll usually get a Whole bunch of applications that are not relevant. There are people that are just spam applying to job posts because they can, and you don't want to see those. So people that are spam applying to job posts, they only get a lot of 10 apply points per day. And so if they want to apply to 10 jobs, they have to use one apply point for each of those 10. Or if they only apply to one job that day, they could use 10 apply points on that job. And that tells you it's a general indication of how serious they are in applying to that job. The more apply points they have to use, or the more apply points they use, the more serious they are typically. And they can accumulate up to like 50 apply points at a time. So I use the apply points as a way to weed out unqualified people. If you apply to my job with one apply point, well, I'm just not even going to look at your. I'm not even going to look because I know you're not serious. So that's. There's another tip in writing your job post that'll be really helpful. So at this point, you have. You've started to interview people by email. I'm sending them emails. I'm asking questions. I do not go do a video interview. This is the thing that most people want to do. They jump straight to a video interview. And that's a problem in the Philippines. There's a bunch of reasons why I'm not going to get into it. But if you're going to do a video interview, that's the very last thing you're going to do once you've already narrowed this down. Lazy people don't want to go through this process.

They're not serious about your position.

Yeah, so lazy people don't want to go through this. And so they'll just stop responding to you. You'll find people that are that as they respond to you, you're like, oh, yeah, this isn't right. So you'll stop responding to them. And it's really easy to filter people out like this. As you start filtering, you'll get an idea like, oh, yeah, this isn't gonna work, or oh, I don't like getting an email from this person. I don't like the way this communication is happening. I'm just gonna not respond to this person or I'm gonna tell them I decided to go a different direction. And you'll find some people, you're really excited to talk to them, and that's really awesome. So pursue that. You'll narrow it down. It's pretty easy to narrow down to 2, 3, 5 people at this point. If you want to do an interview, great. If you want to do a test task, that's a great thing to do. If it's going to take someone longer than about 20 minutes, you should offer to pay for this. People in the Philippines are very scared about doing work and not getting paid. They're very scared about getting scammed. So you're scared about getting scammed. They're more scared than you about getting scammed, about doing a bunch of work and not getting paid. Which that also brings me to trust. And when you start doing this test, you're going to have someone doing something that is, you know, it's not in your business, but it's, you know, something related to your business. You go into this thinking, I don't know if I can trust this person, right? They go into this thinking, I don't know if I can trust this person. But their feeling of distrust is stronger than your feeling of distrust. So, like, you're feeling, you have a feeling of scam. Their feeling of not getting scammed is stronger than yours. Their feeling of not trusting you is stronger than your feeling of not trusting them. So if you want someone to be really great, you have to do things to gain their trust. And that starts in this interview process, which is why one of the reasons why we don't do the video interview up front, because it does not breed trust with them. You're starting to gain their trust in the interview process. You're communicating with them. They're starting to see, oh, yeah, this is a real person. This guy is not gonna scam me. If you're going to have them do a test, you're going to pay them for that. You might pay them $10 for that test task. You know, like, it's not. This isn't a lot, right? And some people might say, no, I need $20 to do this. Okay, fine, I'll pay you $20, whatever, right? @ this point, you have a really good idea of who you're going to hire. And now it's time to decide on one of them. Like, say, hey, I'm ready to hire you. And here's the terms. I want to hire you full time, I want to hire you part time, I want to hire you hourly, whatever it is, I want to pay you this much. You'll get a good idea. Because you've already looked at profiles. You can look at their profile and see how much they're asking to make you can negotiate salaries. When can you start? Oh, I can start tomorrow. Oh, it's. Today is Thursday. How about I start Monday? Great. Sweet. What's my first task now? You're going to send them an email with their first task or some people want to get on a video call with them and give them their first task. Fine, whatever. You'll find that if you record things, that's a lot better. That allows them to watch it multiple times to make sure things are going right. Here's a really big tip. When I hire someone, the first thing I tell them is like, here's your first task. I know you're going to get stuck on this task. I know you're going to have a problem with it. What I do not want you to do is to disappear because that's the worst thing you can do is disappear when you get stuck on something. I want you to try and figure this out. I want you to see. Use your brain. You're smart. I've hired you because you're smart. Try and ask a friend if they know something. Search the Internet, whatever. When you don't feel like you're making progress, then you contact me and I'm going to help you through this. And I expect this to happen. I expect you to get stuck because here's the real thing. In the Philippines, they don't want to let you down. They don't want to disappoint you if you've given them instructions. In their culture, it's their job to understand or in our culture, it's our job to explain. If someone didn't understand, that's our fault that we didn't explain it right. In their culture, if they don't understand, that's their fault. And so they're hesitant to come to you and say, hey, I don't understand. So you have to make it very clear. When they get stuck, when they don't understand, they need to come to you. That's what you expect of them. And if you'll do that, you'll solve like 90% of the problems you have with people, especially in the beginning. So again, I cover this in more detail at 1vaoa.

That's very helpful though. Just to know enough about their expectations and their fear coming into this relationship as well, that it's not just, you know, the fear that I have. Right. I mean so self centered really. But I feel like in a way too, uh, you know, they, they're, they almost have more, they're putting more risk out there than, than we are in this Relationship too, right? I mean just more times than not, right?

Wait, I mean like you're, you're giving someone access to your business, but they're giving you control over their life. Like in the Philippines, there's no recourse if you don't have money there, you don't, you don't eat. There's no, there is no go to the food pantry and get food. There's no, there's no government assistance in the Philippines if they don't have food, if they don't have money, they, they don't eat. And if so, if they do a bunch of work and you don't pay them well, then they're just screwed. Like their kids aren't going to eat for a few days, you know, so they're putting a lot of risk in you. And what you'll find is in the Philippines. So your fears of them stealing from you or whatever is like they're more trustworthy than, than people in the US.

Let'S move a little bit to. Okay, now we found somebody talk through the hourly versus say part time, full time. But even the, you know, paying them hourly versus task based just some help us think through how we should do that.

So you can do whatever you want. And all my jobs, you can do whatever you want. We focus on, on or we don't focus on. We recommend hiring full time or hiring part time. Hiring on a salary. Part time work is always associated with temporary work. If you hire them part time, they assume this is going to end because there's so much of this in the Philippines. This is going to end in six weeks, six months. I get asked by people in the Philippines, when does this contract end? Like what's the end date? What do you mean? Like there's no, there's no end date. Well, there's an end date, right? No, I want this to work forever. Like I want you to work for me. So the Philippines culture expects an end date when something is part time. So if they're working part time, that means they're going to be working full time somewhere else. At least they're very likely to be looking for full time work somewhere else. So if you get someone full time and take care of them, then their, their focus will be on you and they want to help you succeed because they want to keep their job. They want your business to succeed. So that's a really big deal. Now I do have people on my team that work for me hourly because they want to work hourly. I don't know why. Usually they work Full time, hourly. But we pay them based off of the number of hours that they work. I don't track their hours, I just tell them to track it. They can track it however they want. We have time tracking software if you want to use time tracking software. I don't use it because I don't like it. So the per project thing is fine. If you want to hire someone per project, that's totally fine. You can do that. Just whatever you work out with the people in the Philippines. Just be aware that in my experience, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time now, most per project stuff prevents small business owners from growing their businesses. I mean, I get that it seems really awesome to have something that is low commitment and if they're not busy, you don't have to worry about it. But that's the exact thing that keeps you in bondage to your business that prevents you from being the CEO where you're not concerned. Oh, if they're not busy, then I don't really care. That's not my problem. I can focus on my emails still. I can spend my silly time on email. Whereas if that person works full time for you, you're responsible for their hours. Well, now you have to step away from whatever is consuming your time, all the time. And you have to work on your business and give them instructions, give them things to do and think about how can we grow the business through them rather than just focusing in your business all the time. That was the biggest transition thing for me was hiring someone full time. And that forced me to become more CEO like, rather than grunt worker like.

Yeah, it's changing your mentality towards it as well.

There's this element of like, oh, how, how should I handle them? But there's, there's an element that we don't think about of. No, this is going to change me and my ability to run my business. Like you take a leap here and you hire someone full time and yep, it's going to cost you $600 a month for a full time person or maybe $800 a month. Right. Full time. That's going to change you. It's less about them. It matters for them.

You mentioned say a tracking software and things like that. I know, a concern for listeners. I've heard this for years as well. It's like, well, how do I know they're doing what they're supposed to be doing? Or I'm paying them this full time salary like you talked about. How do we know they're actually doing it? Speak through that a little bit. And those concerns or accountability and ensuring performance, things like that.

In my life, life, I typically do things differently than everybody else does, and it has served me really, really well. One of the things that I do differently is I hire people to do the things that I'm doing. I want the time freedom because the time freedom lets me be really, really effective at the things that I spend my time on, because my brain is not focused on other things.

Right.

And so I. I hire people that. To do things that I know how to do. And so at least in the beginning, so when they're working, I have a really good idea of how long this thing takes. You know, I know if they're productive or not. And after they've worked for me for a couple weeks, I know, oh, yeah, this should be taking you this long. Why are you doing less and less? You know, what. What's going on? And I'll say something. You know, your productivity's down. What's going on? And usually that lets them know, yeah, I am paying attention because it is a virtual relationship, and they're not. They're not seeing them. Right. But the other side of it is this is $4 an hour. Is it really worth worrying about? Focus on what makes you money rather than on those extra $70 in the month where you could have made $100,000. You focus on 70. So, yeah, I mean, you don't want to be getting ripped off. You don't want to be getting hosed. So if you want to track time, that's fine. It's really intrusive. Like, if you want someone to turn on a time tracker, that's fine. Go for it. That's what we have at Online job onlinejobs. Ph. Timeproof. It takes screenshots of their desktop. And I hate it, and they hate it, and it's just not a great way of building their trust in you. And that's it. I mean, all of my people work. We pay my salary. They do their jobs. We have a good idea if they're showing up or not. Right. Like, did the work get done or not? If they. If they not responding every day, then I have a pretty good idea that something's wrong.

Speak to that meeting cadence and follow up and how you stay just in touch with them. And, you know, Adam, sure, it's depending on. There's what they're doing for you. Right. But walk through that a little bit.

So I want a daily report from them. I want to report every day. And the way that I work Me personally is I don't want to think about what other people are doing. I want to be effective at what I'm doing. And if I'm constantly thinking about what they're doing, though, that's a little bit more of my brain's bandwidth away from what I should be working on. So I give them instructions, I give them training, I give them feedback, whatever. And then when I send that to them, I leave it alone. It goes away from my head. And I require them to send me a daily email. And actually, it was a daily email in the beginning. Now we use a project management system. They post in the project management system what they're doing. And in that, I ask for three things. Number one, what did you do today? And that's like, pretty much that's all of it, right? And I know if they don't. If they don't tell me what they did today, well, maybe they didn't do something today, or maybe there's a problem. And so the problem of them disappearing, if they're not responding to me, if they're not giving me a daily report that tells me something is wrong and I probably need to go approach them and say, hey, what's wrong? You're not. You're not sending me a daily report. The second thing is, what problems did you run into? Which I don't often get an answer to that question. And the third thing is, what can I help you with? And I get an answer to that one even less. But just having those three things, what did you do today? What problems did you run into? What can I do to help you? Lets them know, okay, I can come to him for help. When I get stuck on something, this solves. I mean, it's just this. The disappearing problem is the number one problem that people have, and this helps solve it. So. And that again, it's daily for me, that's. That daily piece is really important real quick.

And. And we'll move on. But how do you manage all those. All that feedback, you know, from what you say, 30 people. Oh, what is that?

Look, I. I hired my team one person at a time. I never hired. I don't ever remember. I mean, until very recently. I don't ever remember hiring two people at once and hiring two people at once. I had people managing that process. So it was one person at a time. And I can manage one person. And then I started getting, you know, you just to get these reports, and it's like, oh, yeah, you did your work. Sweet. That just took me 20 seconds of management, great job. That's all I did. I sent them back. Great job. Right? Or maybe I spent five minutes giving more training or more feedback or whatever, and that's my interaction with them for the day. And so If I have 20 people at five minutes each, well, you know, there's a couple hours of work, but that's all I'm doing. I mean, in my business, that's all I'm doing is just managing people because I don't have anything left that is my responsibility. Right? I've. I've given it all to people.

What's an average pay for the listener that's never heard of this before? What should you expect to pay somebody being in the Philippines and what's, I mean, what's fair, right? And to give you an example, you know, one of the first people I hired in the Philippines, I remember her, uh, she was a schoolteacher there, and she was making $3 an hour, right? And I think, you know, the, right off the bat, I was paying her six, you know, before, you know, she grew, right. And we were paying her more than that. And so it was, think about, you know, if you could just double somebody's income immediately, just the lifestyle difference, right? But, you know, I guess give some context. You've. You're a lot more experienced than I am, and, you know, what should somebody expect to pay for different skill sets and what's fair, right. I mean, in a sense, I felt like I was almost taking advantage of, of them, you know, but just wondered your. Your thoughts.

So the most common salary request I see is $5 an hour. $5 an hour in the Philippines for most people is pretty good. I mean, it's life changing. You want to hire someone who's really talented, someone who's going to run Facebook ads for you, it's going to cost more. It's going to be $10 an hour. You can hire, you can hire new people. You can still hire new people at $3 an hour. I mean, I recently, I recently saw multiple people. In fact, I had. My, My son is serving a mission as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Philippines, which is so crazy to have him be there. And he's sending me these people. He's like, dad, this guy needs a job. He's amazing. I, I love this person and I trust him completely. Like, okay, cool. And I, I'll talk to him. How much do you want to make? If I can make $300 a month, that would be so awesome, right? That's like if I could make $300 a month, that would be amazing, right? Well, $300 a month is very, still very poverty. But their option is zero, right? I mean like they're eating rice one time a day in some cases. Now that's not a fair wage, right? Where I would say a fair wage for a full time person should be $450 a month for a, for a beginner. You want someone who's fluent in English, you're going to pay 600, 700, $800 a month and they're going to do some, they're going to do really good stuff for you. You want a programmer, they're going to be a thousand or twelve hundred or fifteen hundred dollars a month for full time work. So you know, you're looking between, I mean 350 is on the low end. $5 is kind of low average. 10, 11, 12, $15 is, is high end.

And that made me think of, of something else. It's like, okay, as you're thinking about 350 to 120015 or whatever it may be on the very high end, are we or should we. I was trying to think through the level of skill that we should expect. And are they, you know, talked about like Facebook ads for example? Um, you know, and I would expect, or can we expect to find somebody there that's as talented in Facebook ads as we can find somebody in the States? Because I know that's just what the listeners are, are thinking.

I will give you two things. So Facebook ads specifically, right? So I had someone run my Facebook ads in the Philippines for a lot of years. And the problem with Facebook ads for me is I don't know anything about it. So I have no clue what we're doing, right? I have no clue what she's doing. So then I have Someone in the U.S. approach me. He's like, hey, I can do your Facebook ads better, okay? And he says it's going to cost you about the same. Cool, let's try it. Well, it turns out that he contacted me because he's using online jobs and he has people in the Philippines running the ads. So right now he's running my Facebook ads. Well, people in the Philippines on his team are running my Facebook ads. But he's also a, a marketer and so he's, he's giving us really good information on like, hey, you need to try doing this differently. Like, okay, let's try that. Right? So that's been really helpful for us. Google Ads. I had the same exact thing happen. I had Someone running my Google Ads in the Philippines on my team, someone approached me and was like, hey, I can definitely do this better and save you a lot of money. Turns out he has people in the Philippines running the Google Ads and they did a much worse job because of him. Not because of people in the Philippines, but because of him and his incentive structure at running the ads than, than my people were. So I brought it back in house. Our ads are way more effective now than they were with him, this US guy running our ads. Right. So what kind of skill level can you expect? I mean I would definitely trust someone in the Philippines more to run my Google Ads than I would someone in the US Right? And their cost is way less. So like a programmer, the first programmer I ever hired, he, you know, I was like, oh, I don't know if I can, if I can be, do really good work because I'm a programmer. It turns out he was probably the best programmer I've ever met. Right. And I mean I'd put him up against anybody in the world in his talent, you know, like he's legit and you can definitely find, I mean we've hired people away from IBM. Like you're working as a program at IBM and I just found you on online jobs and oh, you're only willing to work part time for us. Cool. Come work part time for us. Hey, what if we want to hire you away from IBM? We're going to hire you full time and we're paying you more because they're paying poorly and whatever. So yeah, I mean you can hire really, really high end talent.

That's incredible. And I just think it's helpful for as a listener to know that as well you're not just finding somebody to manage your email me like you are finding quality talent, you know, I mean skills that, that you, you can get in the States and like you said, probably even better a lot of the time. And so what about. I know this comes up as well. I know you answer, I've heard you answer that, talk about this on other interviews and whatnot. And I get this question as well, but obviously the trust security piece and you know you're giving them access to your email, you're giving them access potentially to, I don't know, your bank accounts or accounting or whatever it may be. Speak to the, the security piece. The trust piece.

Yeah. So back up, don't, don't give them access to your email and your bank account and your, all that stuff right away. Right. So my people do have access to those Things, they have access, a couple of them have access to my personal email account, they have had access to my bank account, they've access to my PayPal account. The only thing they don't do is they don't pay themselves because then they would know how much each other made. Right. That took me a while to get to that point. I had to, I had to learn, yeah, I can, I can trust them. And then the more I did it, I mean, this has been, you know, 18 years now, but the more I did it, the more I realized, oh, yeah, as soon as I hire someone, I know I can trust this person because I've been through that really good interview process and I know the culture of the Philippines and I know that I can trust them. But you shouldn't do that up front and get yourself, you know, make yourself really, really scared. Right? So give incremental access. Give access to something. I mean, if you're going to hire a bookkeeper, well, it's really hard to not give access to QuickBooks. You know, like, they can't do their job without access. And so there has to be some level of trust there. Now the Philippines theft laws are really serious in the Philippines and the government is really on board with online work. And so they have made digital theft, the punishments are double of normal theft. And the Philippines is a very authority, respectful country culture. They respect authority. So they know if I were to steal something here that is super duper wrong and then they would lose their job. And that job is really, really critical to them. So I have seen cases of theft, but almost every single case, the employer tried to get them to do some work and then not pay them and they're just trying to get paid. It's so rare to see a malicious case of theft. I mean, like, we've had over half a million employers and the number of times I've seen theft, I could count on one hand, like just malicious theft for theft purposes, just not. It's not realistic. Yeah, hey, you can give, you can use LastPass and share your password so they don't ever actually see the passwords, so it's easy to revoke their access. You know, that's super reasonable. You can give limited access to most things where rather than making them an editor, you can make them a viewer or, you know, whatever it is, you can give limited access. So. But at some point you do, you do have to trust. And what I find, like, it's not any different than trusting someone in the US they're on the different other side of the world. And people have a problem with that. You know, it's different, it's foreign. They're all scammers or they're not, you know, but that's what we think. So. But you have to try it. You have to try it and see, is this really what he says?

How do you see, you know, using, you know, this, this method of employing people and building our teams? How do you see that evolving, you know, as technology advances or anything else?

Everyone's really concerned about AI right now. AI is going to take over the world and we're not going to need. I have multiple people. I mean, I've had a lot of people ask me, is there even going to be a need for VAs anymore? I mean, yeah, you know, if you're writing content like AI content, it's good, it's not helpful part, you know, like original content still requires human creativity. There's still human interaction needed. Google's. Google has for years and years and years, Google's been willing to run your Google Ads for you. Their incentive structure in running those Google Ads is not your incentive structure. Their incentive is to make money. And if you're having them do it, that means you have no clue if it works or not. You have no clue if it could be better. So, yeah, like in AI, I don't let Google do anything for our ads and we're way, way, way more effective doing it ourselves than letting them do anything. In fact, every time they contact us and say, oh, I'm your representative, I can help you, I say no. Because every time we've ever let them help us, they make it worse every single time. So is there a need for this in the future? Yeah, I mean, as long as there's a need for humans, I'll be honest. I started this in 2000. It's been 2005. I hired my first person in the Philippines. I have seen nothing change in that time in terms of need, except for demand has gone up. Demand has gone up and skill has gone up. Right. So recently AI has come along and.

Yeah, no, it's good. What about, even on the personal side, how do they, how do they help? Maybe some ideas outside of being the CEO, but what about, well, I don't know, with the family or scheduling a vacation or anything like that.

I sent one of my people, hey, look, I need some 9 millimeter ammo. You have my credit card in my home address. I don't really care what you do. Don't spend more than a hundred dollars. Right. And nine millimeter ammo. Shut up at my house. I need to renew my passport. I don't know how. Will you tell me how to renew my passport?

Sure.

Go to this link and fill out this form. Oh, I could have googled that, but I didn't want to go through the rabbit hole of reading all the government web pages and whatever was coming with it, right? So this is a classic1. My WordPress website needs to be updated. I could do that, but if I don't find that setting in like one minute, that means I'm going to go down a rabbit hole. And this could be an hour. And I'm just not even going to attempt it. I'm just going to send an email and say, hey, here's what I want. Will you fix this? And maybe it takes them an hour. I don't really care, you know, because that $6 an hour is not worth me thinking about it any more than the 20 seconds it takes to send the email. Right? So I have that son who's in the Philippines. He's a missionarian. Right now he's 21 years old. When he was 11, he wanted to start a business. And he was bugging me and bugging me and bugging me. Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. So I could either discourage him from being an entrepreneur or I could help him, right? And as he started, he has all this stuff going on, and he's. It's like, dude, I have my own stuff. I can't think about your stuff, too. So I just give it to one of the guys in the Philippines. Hey, will you help him solve this? Don't solve it for him, but point him in the right direction. Figure what he's doing out the son. This is 11:12. He sold $350,000 of stuff his senior year in high school, Right? He made quite a bit more than his teachers made. And he had people in the Philippines helping him with it, right? So, yeah, I mean, there's stuff all over the place. Once you do it, it's like this whole world opens up towards. Oh, yeah, I can.

I could.

I could do that. I could do that, right? I don't have them plan our vacations because my wife and I like doing that piece.

Yeah, no, that was just an example. I bet you gave some great ones just like thinking outside the box as far as you're. You're trying to figure this thing out, you know, take you an hour. Well, one of them's more qualified to do it all together, right?

Not even more qualified. Just like it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter to me. My hour is worth so much more than their hour. Even if it's not. Even if my time isn't really worth that much more. I want to spend that time with my kids.

The freedom's worth. That's.

That's the end game is I want to spend the time with my wife and my kids and not on a computer researching something that someone else could research for me and tell me what to do or do it for me.

What's the biggest challenge in your business right now?

The biggest challenge for us right now is we built online jobs in 2008, and it has been added on every single day since. And it's on a really old architecture, and we need to update it, and we've been working on it for a year to update it, and it's really hard. It's kind of like rebuilding it completely from the ground up, even though that I really, really didn't want to do that. But that's what it's like, and it's taking a long time, and it's really, really frustrating. Our focus is always helping employers to have a good experience. We want you to have a good experience in hiring someone. And so that's what we focus on right now. We can't add some things that we want for people to do because the architecture, the way it's built. So we're working on changing that so that we can add good stuff to make it easier for employers.

And I assume you have Filipino help with all, all of that?

Oh, yeah, that's. That's all done in the Philippines. Yeah.

What are some metrics that are. That are most important to you? It could be personally or professionally.

The. The quote that has driven me for most of my life is no other success compensates for failure at home. So for me, where am I spending my time? Is my time spent working or is it spent with my kids and my wife, my family? So I don't have a metric for that, but that's really kind of what drives me, is I want to make sure that I succeed at home first. In the business, our metrics are number of monthly users, monthly active users. I want to see that going up every month. And it, for the most part, it goes up every month. November and December are slow. Nobody wants to hire someone new in November, December. But other than that, it grows up every month.

So I have never heard that quote, but that is. It's right up my alley. I love that. Yeah. I also want to be. Want to be famous at home. Right. More so than. Or in the, in the. I say in the dining room versus the boardroom. Right. Much, much, much more important. So I appreciate your, your focus on that in a big way. Any other habits that you're disciplined about that have produced a high return for you, whether it's in the business or even around, you know, a personal habits or around family or anything like that?

Yeah, I actually have a number, so I read my scriptures every day. I don't miss days of reading my scriptures. It's not always a lot. Some days it's just one verse. But that has given me. I mean, I cannot quantify the returns in the peace of mind of the knowledge I have gained. So that's one. I do yoga probably five days a week. I only do like 10 minutes. But it keeps me and my body feeling good. And so that's a really big habit at work. My number one, this isn't a habit, but it's the thing that changes work for me, which is, I think that's my job. I think if something is like menial work for me, I'm not going to do it. I'm just not going to do it. And if I'm not doing it, that means someone else is doing it or it's not getting done because my most important time is spent thinking. So then along with that, when I'm sitting in front of the computer, I am super, super effective. There is no YouTube for me. I haven't seen that latest video. I don't have Instagram on my phone. Instagram or Facebook on my phone. So I don't spend time doing. I don't spend time on social media. That habit of like eliminating distractions, it makes me so. I only work like 15 hours a week. That's how. And that's a. That's a really big. That's a really big deal.

Love that. The habit of eliminating distractions. Is there any, any resource or anything that's helped you to do that? Well, that's hard.

The probably the best thing was stopped reading the news years ago. I just stopped. And it's probably been 10 years. And I, I mean, I'm so much better off because of it. I mean, because I've learned more and more again, given what I do. I've learned, oh, news is not news. It's entertainment. It's a business. Their job is to garner eyeballs. It doesn't matter if it's Fox News on one side and MSNBC on the other side. They're both making up crap because they have to get eyeballs. Right. And so I stopped reading the news and wow, what a difference in my life that made.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Very few, very few places to get, get factual news and you have to be careful about that. And I love that. What about the number one thing that's contributed to your success?

Thinking. That's it. That what I talked about. I, I think and solve problems the hardest, the hardest of the hard work is the thinking work. You know, building a website, doing the research isn't hard. It's the thinking behind it. It's being willing to think to teach someone else to do this. Yep. It's going to take you longer to teach someone else to do it. That's the hard work, but that's the most valuable work. So, yeah, I'm too busy to teach someone else. Oh, yeah, you're right, you're too busy. You're always going to be too busy. And that's where, that's where I have excelled is in saying, yeah, I'm going to do this hard work and I'm going to spend the time to hire someone, even though I'm too busy to hire someone, knowing or hoping that in three months that's going to make me less busy. And it has over and over and over again. But that's hard. And thinking through like, oh, I have to make the sale. How do I make the sale? What's the process to make sales? I have to do this and this. That's, that's hard. But it's the thought work.

How do you like to give back?

So I have a number of things. I serve in the church quite a bit. I donate quite a bit of money. I ride my bike a lot. Like I, I mountain bike a lot. And I do trail work. I help coach my kids, the high school mountain bike team.

John, grateful for how you've given back to us today and just diving into hiring specialists in the Philippines and, and how we can really optimize our business and ultimately gain back more time. Right. And more time we could spend thinking like you're talking about. I love your focus on thinking and how that is the hard work. I could not agree with you more. You know, and the listeners have heard stories of, of how it was when I had uninterrupted thinking time that it like a whole pivot was made in our business or, or in our family or big decisions made with, between, with my wife and I, you know, for the trajectory of our family or something because of some uninterrupted thinking time.

Right.

And so just, I love your focus on that and just saying, hey, this is, you know, this is the hard work and how you focus on that and eliminating distraction. So grateful for that. John, how can the listeners get in touch with you and learn more about you and how to start this process of hiring their first specialist?

Number one, go to OFS guide.com OFS online Filipino specialist guide.com so that will answer the, the rest of the questions you have about taxes and time zones and security and wages and that, that's, it's like a five minute read from there. One VAOA.com that I talked about will walk you through the process of finding someone great. I make posts on social media, but I don't do the posting. So that's probably not a great way. I mean, people in the Philippines do the posting. For me, really the best thing is my newsletter. I put a lot of work into my newsletter. I send it three times a week. I get emails every single day from people telling me, yours is the only newsletter letter I read. And you can, you can opt into that@john jonas.com and you can opt out at any time. It's super easy to unsubscribe, but that's a, that's a really good, it's a really good way.

Awesome. That's a wrap, John. That's the end of the show.