Your First Virtual Assistant Hire - What To Do - Course Video 6 - John Jonas

Hey, this is John, and in this video we're going to talk about your first hire, evaluating who you should be hiring the very first time. My experience, in my opinion, is that the first person you should hire is someone to do something that you are currently doing. And I know this is a little bit different. It's the opposite of what most people say is you should hire someone to do something you don't know how to do. My experience is if you want to change your lifestyle, you should hire someone to do something you're currently doing. For me, in the beginning, that was a programmer, I graduated from College of Computer Science and I was trying to do programming in my business, and programming does not make money and it's very consuming. So I had a very hard time being the CEO of my business. The second person I hired was to do marketing tasks. And when I hired them, I wanted them to work at nighttime, their hours, so they were online during my hours so I could make sure they were doing everything right. And what I realized was it's not very productive for them to work online at night. So. And I didn't need them working my hours. They could still do the same things that I was currently doing on their own time. They were intelligent enough, they could do it on their own. So my first thing with this is, find something that you are currently doing. My second thing with this is I had specific things that I wanted done. I didn't just have this generic idea of, oh, I want a person to help me. I knew exactly what I was going to have them do, and that's really important. So the first guy, the programmer, I was going to have him take over the program that I was currently doing. We needed these specific things added. The second guy, I had a system of marketing tactics that I wanted him to implement, and they were very specific. And so what I would suggest for you is you find the things that you're currently doing, and there are things that you're doing over and over and over again in your business. There are things like you need to be posting to Facebook every day. You need to be publishing content all over the place. There are things that you need to be doing every day, having touches with your customers or participating in forums. Have a specific thing that you're currently doing, something that you know how to do, and you're going to get someone else to do it. What this does is it allows you to free up your brain from those simple tasks, to allow your brain to work on bigger things and to kind of let go of those smaller Things. So the first guy, he was implementing a specific marketing system. For me, that marketing system was taking up a lot of my brain power. And when I had him do it, I could step away from that. And then he was doing those tasks, and I could now start thinking, oh, well, I wonder what else we could do for marketing. And that's a really big deal. So once you've hired this person, your job then becomes to provide training and feedback and training and feedback and training. Your job is not to do the tasks anymore. You're now to teach this person how to do what you're doing. And when they don't do it exactly as you would like, you provide them feedback until they get really good at it. And once they're really good at it, you move on to another task. So your first thing is to find something that you're currently good at and that you can teach someone else to do. Here's the second thing. To evaluate as you go to hire someone, you need to evaluate why you're doing this. So are you doing this because you're lazy? Because you don't want to do work? If that's the case, this is going to be really hard, and it's not going to work for you. If you're not sure why you're doing it, this is not going to work either. You've got to know why you're doing it. Maybe you're doing this so you can switch your focus, which is really awesome. If you can switch your focus from being the guy that does everything to being the CEO, that's where you'll really start making money in your business. Maybe your goal with this is just to get more done, and that's a good way to do this, where you're going to have someone else so you can implement more things in your business. But as you. As you learn to switch your focus and get them to do the things, that. That's where things really start to improve. So as you go through this, I want you to look at what your current skills are and what skills you don't have. Because what skills you don't have, at some point you're going to need to outsource those things. And then what skills you do have that you could get someone else to do. So I have a couple notes here. I want to make sure I cover everything. So for me, for example, copywriting, I'm pretty good at copywriting, but I hate doing it, But I could teach someone else to do it. So that was one of the very first that I wanted to get someone else doing. So I hired a girl whose English is really, really great and I started teaching her how to write sales copy. And today she does a really good job of it. It taken me a long time, but I could teach her how to do it. Another thing that I could, that I really don't like to do, but that needs to get done in my business are repetitive tasks. Anything that's repetitive, submitting content, writing content, participating in forums, things that I don't like to do, but things that need to be done every single day. Social media. I can hire someone else to do those things and give them instructions on how we do these things. And that's something you can pretty do. SEO is another one. I don't like doing SEO. I don't like getting links to our site. I don't like, I don't want to go contact other webmasters. It's not something I like doing, but it's really important in our business and I know how to do it and so I can give someone else instructions on how to do it and then I, and then I can give them feedback as they do it. Another thing that, and I've already mentioned this, is programming. I don't like doing programming. I like doing programming, but I don't like that it doesn't make me money. And so that's one of the very first things I recommend you get, you get to someone else, whether it's probably a webmaster, someone to deal to manage your WordPress for you. So you're not messing with the little intricacies of WordPress, trying to get things exactly right. Get someone else to do that for you. So here's, here's kind of a big difference in what I do from what most people do. I almost always try and hire a full time person to take care of things that we're doing. Because what I've learned in my business is if there's something we need to get done, there's another thing that needs to get done. There's always multiple things. However, there's occasionally there are urgent things that we need to do. And for some of those urgent things I will use some of the other outsourcing methods that people teach, like using odesk.com or elance.com or fiverr for a single thing. We're never going to do this again. I'll go to one of those sites and get someone to do something really quickly, something that I can't train someone to do or I don't want to train someone because it's Only one time. That's when I'll go and deviate from my normal outsourcing process. The problem with that is, and as you evaluate, you got to figure out where this works for you, is if you're hiring a contract worker, you put a lot of effort into the hiring and getting that project done and it only pays off once. Whereas if you're hiring a full time person, you put a lot of effort, the same amount of effort basically into hiring and getting that person up to speed and then it pays off a hundred times over. So that's really the big difference between hiring a contract worker who only works for you a little bit of the time and hiring a full time person who works for you permanently. So one of the things that I often find that people want to hire someone for is to build their website. You want to hire a webmaster or a programmer, and I think it's worth talking about ahead of time. Before you go and try and find someone, let's evaluate what your real needs are. If you're building a custom website that requires database interaction on the back end and users are going to be entering data and you're going to be collecting that data and processing it, you need a programmer, you need a PHP programmer to build this for you. Along with that, you probably also need a designer because programmers will do a terrible job of designing things for you. On the other hand, your website is an informational site where someone's coming to find out more about you or you're trying to sell something to someone. You don't need a programmer, you need a Webmaster or a WordPress expert. Most people are building sites in WordPress today, and someone who knows WordPress can do this way better and cheaper than a programmer will. So I had a guy come to me recently who said, hey, who's your best programmer? And I said, well, here he is. This is someone I know, he's really great. And he hired him and said, well, wait a minute, he's terrible. And I said, well, what did you have him do? Oh, I had him. I had him do this design work so that he could then turn it into a WordPress theme. Like that's, that's not even the same thing. That's not a programmer's job, that's a webmaster's job. So I think it's important you understand the difference between a programmer and a webmaster. A webmaster will often be able to do some design work, but really their job is to look at the front end and lay stuff out on your site. Their job is to make stuff functional for you and the better designer they are, the easier it is for you. So if you can find multiple skills, specifically in a webmaster who can do webmaster and design work, you'll find that it makes your life easier in that position to go along with this. One of the things that I found is employers often want to hire or business owners want to hire someone just temporarily. So I just need a website built and once it's built then I don't need this person anymore. And what they find is they get their website built and they say, oh, but I need to tweak this. And if you hired a contract worker to do this, rather than hiring a full time person, that contract worker is no longer available. And now you have to go back and find another contract worker and give them access to everything you have and explain to them your file system and their website. And there's all kinds of stuff that goes along with getting someone else to make a forward change in your site. Whereas if you hired someone full time who can do webmaster work and maybe can also do SEO, then now you have ongoing tasks for this person. And when you need changes done, it's very easy to get those changes done. Also with that, what I have seen is that once you've built something, if you don't maintain it, it dies. If you build an app, you don't maintain it, it's going to die. If you build a website and you don't maintain it, you don't update it, you don't add to it, it's not going to do you good for very long, it's going to be a very, very short term thing. And this is why I have found so many other people have found that hiring full time workers in the Philippines is so much better than hiring a contract worker. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is how good is someone's English. So if you're hiring a programmer or a webmaster or designer, English isn't really that important. However, for most other tasks, writing, social media, marketing, English is really, really important along with good English. I find that someone who speaks good English usually has had a better upbringing. They tend to be smarter, they can fix problems better. Generally someone with really good English is going to be a better worker. Not always the case. The very first person I hired, his English wasn't great and he's my best worker. Overall, he's amazing. But generally the better the English is that you're going to find from someone, the better off of a worker you're going to have from that person. It also allows you to give them multiple tasks where you don't have to worry about it as much because you know their English is going to be good. So with the people that you hire who are really good English speakers, I don't think it's necessary that you hire them with a lot of other skills. Often I haven't. I just hire them because they have really good English and then I can teach them to do other things. And then when, when they're doing these other things, I know that they're doing them the way that I want them done. One of the last things I want to talk about in this is who the most impactful people have been in my business and what I've seen often in other businesses so that you can evaluate your needs with a little bit more knowledge. The number one best person I've ever had is a guy who I hired first whose English wasn't great. I didn't know his English wasn't great. He didn't really know anything. But what he is is a dedicated, hard working person who wants to keep his job. He's reliable. He shows up every single day. This guy, over the years I've taught him a lot and he's learned a. And so as you go to hire someone, one of the things I would recommend you looking for is how dedicated do I feel like this person is going to be? How reliable are they going to be? Because that's going to make a big difference. Over the years, his English has improved significantly. Not that I think you should hire someone thinking I'll teach them English because that's not a good strategy. And in the beginning I didn't know this, but today he has learned to manage projects so that I can hand him projects and he can have other workers do work on it. He has learned to be a webmaster also. He's learned so many things over the years and he's one of the two people that I will not ever let go. The other guy who has made the biggest difference in my business is a programmer who also has some design work, some design skills, and this is very rare. To find a programmer with design skills even in the Philippines is hard. However, what I found is that you're running a technical business. Anybody running anything online, it's technical. There's technical work to be done and you need technical help. If you want to improve things, you've got to have help to do the web stuff. And this guy can do anything I ask him to do. And he does a really good job with it. So those two workers are kind of what I would recommend as people's initial looks at hiring. Find someone who can replace what you're doing in your business. And that's usually either someone with good English who's dedicated and hard working is going to work for you long term, or it's a technical person who can replace you as the webmaster, content manager of the website. And maybe he can also do some SEO work for you to help you improve your traffic. So your job right now then, is to make a list of things that you're currently doing in your business and then try and group some of those things together into something that you think you could teach someone else to do and order them in order of importance. This is the number one thing that would save me time. I'm going to hire someone to do this task, and when they're done with this task, I'm going to. I'm going to get them to do this other task, and then I'm going to get them to do this other task as they get good at that. That's the best way, in my opinion, to go about hiring your first person.