Hiring a Virtual Assistant | Should you leverage offshore talent to grow your payroll company?

Alright, so working with virtual assistants is not a new thing, but I feel like we're getting more questions, more comments, more concerns about it lately.

We've got a lot of our clients and peers interested in it.

There are a lot of people with limiting beliefs about what someone who is offshore can do or bring to their team. Oftentimes people have a really bad experience once and then they never go back to it, um, and also Some people are just worried about kind of getting screwed over, worried about the quality of the work, don't trust it, don't know where to get started. Tons of concerns about this, tons of misinformation out there, these wild success stories of people working with virtual assistants, running entire teams offshore.

It kind of, you know, poisoned the well for a lot of people that maybe just need some more basic help on an ongoing basis.

So we're going to help you navigate this. In this episode, we're going to talk about our experiences working with virtual assistants and offshore staff. In our last 7 years, we've worked with—

I think I looked up before this, Karen— we've completed over 100 contracts with offshore assistants ranging from virtual assistants doing general administrative work all the way through to people that are now full-time with our team and agencies that are full-time with our team doing more skilled projects for us, ranging in everything from web development to search engine optimization to data mining and all sorts of fun stuff.

So Karen, how are you?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm amazing. Thank you. So tell me a little bit on the front side here.

I mean, what do you think are some of our biggest successes so far in working with offshore talent and virtual assistants?

So I think to your point, it's been a process to get to where we are, but there's a lot of benefits that come with finding the right assistants, virtual assistants, offshore talent. It takes some time to get there. But if you're patient in the process and you learn what you need and what you're looking for, and you vet out the right candidates and you have the right process in place, you can find candidates that actually are an extension of your team. And I think that's a lot of where companies are in the mix right now is they might be using some contractors for a project basis and they use them for, you know, for a project here and there, but they're not using them to the benefit of as part of their team. And here I think one of the biggest benefits—

sorry, I love it. If you're watching the video, Karen's cat just made a cameo in the background. So yeah, you don't need to hide the cat. It's all right, it's 2022.

Um, that's my virtual assistant right there. Um, but we have had— so about 2 years ago when we started our marketing agency, we were using just project basis offshore talent for different projects, different needs. Now we have found basically agencies and a full-time virtual assistant that we're using, and it allows us internally to save money on the whole aspect of having a full-time employee based here in the United States. And then it also— they are so willing to work and they're so dedicated to getting the job done. You know, these offshore talents, they will go above and beyond if you find the right one and they're willing to learn. So you have to provide them with the right trainings, with the right, you know, they are going to have to learn some different things and there's going to be some barriers in the way. But when you find the right ones and they're part of your team, they actually are a huge help. So excited to talk about the successes we've had, especially with our full-time virtual assistant that we're now using.

Yeah, and that's something to talk about here on the front side, right? So benefits first and foremost. I mean, you know, cost is obviously a benefit. The cost of living and the income and wages in some of the countries where we hire virtual talent is far less than here in the United States. I'm going to tread lightly there. Have you ever heard of Sweaty Startup? No. So it's a great Twitter follow. Dude is, uh, he grew like a moving company and then some, some, uh, now he invests in a lot of self-storage businesses. But anyway, so he's very active online, has a great following. He's all about like, hey, start a sweaty business, like start a landscaping company, start a pressure washing business. Really good message. But it's funny because he was online the other day on Twitter and he was doing a thread about how he, he's grown his team from 5 to 18 people using offshore talent. And now he pays his virtual team in the Philippines $5 an hour and he just got skewered.

I mean, people are like, how are they supposed to live on these wages? What are you doing? Why are you, you know, you're exploiting labor.

And meanwhile, I mean, these are wages that are satisfactory in their area.

You know, nobody's holding them captive to work for him. He's hired, you know, but of course the morale police come out in full force online and start trying to bring down why it's a, you know, a good idea or bad idea or whatever.

So there, you know, first thing is you're going to want to do some research as to what the wages are in the place where you're hiring. Well, it's not first thing, but it's important because I'll give you a good example. We just interviewed a graphic designer in Mexico this past week. Where, you know, the, the average, uh, high-end income for a graphic designer in Mexico was $12,000 a year.

And that was that kind of the top of the range.

And she was asking us for $25 an hour, which interprets to much more.

Now I can understand this if it's somebody who's really high-quality work and who is only gonna be working a couple hours a week. So, you know, we're paying for that expertise and skills, but if they're full-time, you know, we need to get closer to that band.

Bit. So, so, so wages are obviously one advantage to using offshore talent.

The other advantage from my side is like being able to just do things easily on a contract basis. And some of these marketplaces that we're going to talk about here in just a moment make it really easy to find talent, makes it really easy to vet the talent, makes it really easy to kind of see their skill level.

They've got ratings and things like this, and you can, you can plug and play people. And, you know, once again, going back to why have we completed 100 contracts in less than 7 years?

Well, that's because we just use people on a project basis as needed based on their skill set demand at the time. And so it makes it really easy to kind of plug and play talent for some of these more one-off things so that we don't have to train somebody internally so that we don't have to get distracted from what we're doing. But tons of benefits to it.

What are some of the types of tasks that you have?

Let's talk about the HR work that goes with it. Coming from an HR company, of all the onboarding and getting them into the team, it makes that whole process You know, if you have the time to vet out some candidates, you don't have to go through the entire onboarding process and having a team member.

Yeah, let's, let's come, come back to that, like, because there's these elements of one of the things that we've learned over the last few years is, is, hey, we've got to start treating them more like teammates, especially the ones, you know, like you mentioned, we got a full-time person on the marketing team who's offshore.

We've got agencies that act as an extension of our team of agencies, and we'll talk about that in a couple minutes as well.

As well.

But, but there is still, like you said, I mean, we're not going through a 3-week onboarding and training process. It's similar to any contractor in that, you know, and a lot of times you're expecting them to come in with these skills. Or if it's a basic general virtual assistant role, then yeah, we've got to create some, some very simple SOPs that we'll talk about here in a moment as well. But, but what are some of the common tasks that we use folks for when it comes to offshore virtual assistants or talent?

So the easiest way to put that is kind of your tedious tasks, your daily tasks that take up your time that can be trained by someone else. So when you're thinking through, if you plan out your day, and the easiest way to kind of think about this is when you're going through your day, look at what items you're doing that someone else can be taught that you're doing every single day, or at least every week, that can be a process for someone else to do. There are items of your job that you might not be able to use a virtual assistant for, but there are probably 75% that can be trained that you can use. So for instance, on our marketing side, I'm going to be very specific on the marketing side here, everything from social scheduling to reviewing, you know, implementing on websites. If you train someone to how to implement on a website, then they can go ahead and do it. It takes your time away from doing that. We use a CRM that we are getting more into and getting the work in there, sending all the test emails. You know, it goes for these little parts that might just take up 10 to 15 minutes of your day, but they can be easily trained. And once you— those add up and then it opens up a huge block of time for your day having these assistants do that.

Well, and yeah, I'll touch on a couple other things, but you hit on a really important point there too. When you're like searching for offshore support, you can oftentimes— the people will have listed in their profiles what systems they've used. So for example, with that CRM, we were able to find people that have experience in that direct CRM already, more experience than us. We've got a gentleman in the Ukraine who answers questions for us about our CRM.

That's $12 an hour, which is an incredible wage for him and where he's at in his area of the world and is great support to us on a more concierge basis than the support we get from the team that manages that CRM. So tons of different stuff, and I'll rifle through a couple. I wrote down some tasks here of some of the things we've done in the past.

So research, so it's kind of an obvious one.

Tons of different things that we could have people researching.

List building.

So whether you're looking for investors, possible business partners, you know, you want to be on a podcast and you're looking for podcasts to be on. Data entry is obviously another one. If there's something that needs to be moved moved from, you know, a system to a spreadsheet and can't be exported or vice versa. Always an easy one. Excel maintenance and sheet building. Definitely can find people with skills in Excel and Google Sheets that can either put in, you know, put in formulas that you don't know how to do or, you know, update data.

And then we've started to move into more skilled things. Some of these more basic like video editing. So if you're watching this video on YouTube after the fact, the editing will have been done by somebody offshore in the Philippines for $5 an hour.

And it's, it's, you know, they're—

well, are they the most skilled video editor in the world? Absolutely not.

But we just want to get this video out, have good quality, have a good experience for you as you watch it and, you know, keep folks engaged longer. It's not about perfection when it comes to these things.

And so, you know, and I've even toyed with some of the stuff. We had an agency once in the past where we had email management. Somebody was in my email inbox managing my inbox because they were a secure environment. They had these computers locked down. And that's the type of stuff where you want to move more into an agency agency environment and look at what some of their protocols are.

Long term, that didn't work out, wasn't really for me, and talk more about that.

But, but you touched on something really important there because it's one of the funniest things I see people trying to offshore all the time, is you talked about social. Like, offshore people cannot write for you, okay? Like, do not get them in your social media. Do not get them writing emails for you. Do not get them writing blogs. Now, can they post those things? Can they do the SEO on a page when you have them upload a blog and choose the right header tags?

And to, to Karen's point, have some good SOPs for to follow so that when they do that, absolutely. But never for the content creation piece. Never, ever, ever.

Never look for people to create good content.

Yes. Yes. Never, ever search for copywriters outside the US. Yeah. Word of advice. But yes, you hit on a lot of good points, especially like also your organization. You know, if there is from Dropbox to Google Drive to all of our different systems Keeping things organized takes a lot of time, and it's, you know, most people get buried with trying to organize everything and naming everything correctly, and that's a big one that can save a lot of time and they can easily do.

Yeah, and you're even like, you know, you might be listening to this going, what about Zapier? You just need to move something from one system to another.

Well, guess what? We find offshore Zapier experts that can help us to set up this app so that we don't have to key data from one place to another, move moving from here to there, or those systems that don't have— aren't connected to Zapier and things need to be moved, or we're just migrating data because we're changing systems. So tons of different use cases. And, um, let's talk about some of the places where we can find these people.

What are some of your favorite spots when you're looking to hire offshore talent?

So the main place we use is Upwork, and hopefully everyone's heard of Upwork that's listening. If you haven't, Upwork is a great It's like the Indeed of the world to contractors and virtual assistants. So you can just put exactly what you're looking for on Upwork, and you can put the amount that you want to pay. You can— and a bunch of people will apply. And when you get in Upwork, you will get a bunch of responses, and they have everything provided. So they'll have their portfolio of work, they have exactly what they specialize in. They are very— most of them are very particular into what they provide. So they— it helps you narrow down, you know, this one's exactly what I'm looking for, this one not really. Um, so Upwork is a great part for that. You can message them, delete, um, like right in there. You can put if they are— you can check or X them. So if you think that they're a good candidate, you can check them, they'll go into that list. If they are not, you can exit them right out. You can message them right through there, you can hire them right through there. It all gets paid right through there. So Upwork is a great one. Um, Fiverr is another one. I'm saying that right, right? Is it Fiverr?

Fiverr?

Um, so that's another one that works just like Upwork. So those are two. I think Upwork's the biggest one, but those are two that we've used in the past.

Yeah, and, and Upwork is— imagine if Indeed you could actually see the work history of the individual rated by the people they did the work for, right? So that's the cool thing about Upwork is when they close out a project, somebody's gotta rate that. And if you start seeing anything less than 5 stars, you need to click into that and start to see what was bringing it down. Was it because I'll tell you, these people offshore sometimes will badger you out if you give them anything less than 5 stars and, and try to push the rating up because their ratings are so important. And sometimes their work was subpar and they're still pushing, pushing, pushing. So if you see somebody that's rated less than 5 stars, that means that they've really screwed the pooch on that project.

And like somebody was bold enough to actually rate them down because we all know how important the ratings are. So once people start giving bad ratings, I mean, I would really question the quality of the work. And the other thing that we're seeing on Upwork right now that you have to look out for is kind of like the Amazon reviews type scam where these people are getting in little circles where they're doing $5 projects that are obviously for somebody they know just to get more 5 stars so that they can show experience on there.

So keep an eye on, I'm always looking for How, how many long-term contracts have they had, right? So if I hire a VA and they do really good work in the first 10 hours, I'm not gonna all of a sudden cut them loose unless it was just strictly a project, which would typically be a fixed price thing.

And you can hire people for either hourly or fixed price and make sure you're in tune with, you know, what the going rate is for the individual.

So you'll also oftentimes see these people that, you know, they'll have a profile rate of $10 an hour, then they'll apply to your job where you put a $20 to $25 an hour rate, and they'll apply 20, cuz that's what the rate says on your job posting. So make sure you double check back on that.

Make sure you understand once again what the working wage is in their area and offset that sum, right? Like I'm gonna pay more to somebody who's only gonna work 2 hours a week per hour because I know it's kind of a pain to get in and out of our projects. But if you're gonna be working 30, 40 hours a week with us, then we're gonna pay you what the wage is in your area, accounting for the fact that Upwork takes a fee outta their wages.

So Upwork is a great one.

I mean, we've spent, I think, nearing 6 figures on Upwork so far. So we've definitely used that one more than anything else.

We've also— so there are a couple here that we have used, like you mentioned, Fiverr, really just for projects.

You go on Fiverr and they say, hey, I will do this logo for you for $20.

Now, once again, the work is really hit or miss on these places.

So you got to be careful and understand providing clear expectations is really important. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

Virtual Staff Finder is more of a headhunter type agency. I've never worked in this model. This is more like a, hey, we're looking for a full-time person.

We'll pay you $300, $500 to go and find this person for us and bring us the candidates, much like a recruiting agency in the US would.

We have worked with another one called Tasks Every Day. They're more of a, hey, you've got to either have a half-time or a full-time person.

We have them in our office, we have them, you know, we have their machines here. We have— they're kind of set up more with that infrastructure for you.

And they're going to have more, you know, they'll have everything from the general virtual assistants to the full-time skilled folks. And, you know, there are some others here.

Onlinejobs.ph is another good one. That's a job board. You can pay a monthly subscription to recruit talent on there in the Philippines.

And then there's other places that are more specialized by skill set.

And there's sites like GetMagic where they've got, you know, for for $10 an hour, they'll give you a sales and marketing assistant.

But ultimately, at the end of this whole thing, you got to really make sure you're setting up this teammate for success.

What are some of the ways that we set people up and us up for success, Karen?

So this is kind of a trial and error that we've learned over the last couple years, especially. Um, so especially these individuals on Upwork or on Fiverr, wherever you're looking, they're very willing work. So don't be scared to interview them, you know, get them on a Zoom call just like how you would someone here in the US. See how you guys get along. A lot of times there's going to be language barriers. A lot of times there's going to, you know, feeling comfortable with someone is one of the biggest ones, especially if, if it's not as much of a project basis and it's more you're looking for a long term. Set them up just like you would interview someone in person. So try to have them on Zoom, do the multiple interviews, you know, have them, you know, give them a small project. So if they're going to be working on— if you have a whole list of projects that you want them to be working on over time, give them one and see how they perform on it. You know, instead of just getting them all in, giving them everything, give them one of them and see how it comes back. That is something that we are doing now, especially on more of the graphic design side and anything along those lines. Just because you can see the quality of work that comes back before you just bring them in and give them 15 tasks. Just give them one to start with. Make sure you're clear, though, that this is going to be a test project. Let's see, you know, and make sure we work well together. So that is one of the biggest ones that I can say, you know, especially when you're looking for a long-term teammate, making sure that from the beginning that you're working well together and that they're coming up with your quality. You hit on this briefly already, but on our side is making sure the clear directions. So to get everything that you expect, you have to provide them with everything. This is very clear. We use, for example, Loom. Loom is a video recording. So instead of trying to type out and provide a whole page of directions, you can go through and show them an example, walk them through it, and provide that. That usually is much more helpful with them of understanding the task and being able to see how it's done. So that's a big one. I have gone completely almost to Loom and providing video directions over, you know, here's a whole page of directions.

So if that's a little growth hack on that too, is that if you can provide them with the video only— so this, this works much better once you're actually working with somebody regularly. You provide them with the Loom and say, hey, could write this up as well for instructions for the next person that's going to have to do it. So have them actually take the instructions you gave them in the Loom, write them up as a help desk article internally, or put them in a Google Doc or wherever you store your SOPs. So then you've got both things, right? You showed them how to do it.

Now they've created the documentation so the next person can know how to do it.

And then once— also a couple of just tips as you're looking through and trying to find someone. Is there's going to be a major time zone, uh, difference in a lot of these areas. And you have to understand on your end first if you're okay for them to be working while you're sleeping, and there might be a lag time during the daytime when you get feedback or when you provide it that it's not going to come until that night. Or if you want someone that wants to work more, you want them to be working while you're working, you need to make that clear and put that in the description as you're trying to find someone, because that's going to be a big issue to come up if you're expecting someone to be working the whole time that you're working and they're not. And that's just because that might be nighttime there. So that's something internally you need to figure out that's very important to you. If it is, then you need to set those expectations. Another part I would say is determine the amount of hours that you expect them to work. So a lot of these, um, contractors and these virtual assistants will say, I'm available for 25 hours this week. You need to set the expectation that they need to be working for those 25 hours. A lot of them, you know, they will one week work 10 hours, the next week work 25, you know. And if you have projects that you need done that week, making sure that it's clear that there are deadlines that we have that they have to be met. Are you willing to be an extension of our team and hit these deadlines and work the hours that are needed? So that's another item I would just say, very putting these very clear in the description as you're putting up your post, you know, your job is because the more detailed that you are in what you're looking for, the more you're going to get those qualified candidates rather than someone who is just going to work 5 hours a week or they want to work 4 hours this weekend because they're already working full time somewhere else. So putting those clear expectations in will help vet out the correct candidates that you're looking for.

Yeah, and, and one thing on that is those expectations are so critical. It's not—

none of these things are different to hiring in the US except for the fact that obviously you're, you're hiring, your needs are going to vary based on the individual.

But that is so important because you're going to have both sides of that coin. You're going to have the people that you're like, look, I just need you 3 to 5 hours a week to edit videos, and they're just going to be pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to work 40 hours a week because they just need more work. Then you're gonna have people that you wish you could have for 25 hours a week and they're gonna have— and this is one thing to look out for, particularly on Upwork. If somebody has currently 50 open contracts, like there's a pretty low likelihood that they're gonna be responsive to your needs. So it's almost this double-edged sword of like, ooh, this is awesome.

Clearly a bunch of people will have them continuing working, but, and they continue to apply and try to get more and more and more, even though what you'll start to notice is their ratings will start to dip because everybody will get caught up in the hamster wheel of like this person started doing good work for a batch of folks and now they're in high demand and now they can't keep up with all the work coming in.

So that happens pretty consistently. But Karen touched on a couple of things there. So yeah, for SOPs, you know, it can be as simple as Google Doc or Word doc with a Loom video with also we use Snagit is a great tool for this. Snagit, good to capture video, good to capture screenshots, create those help articles, make them crystal, crystal, crystal clear. Remember, this is likely this person's second language., and it's super impressive that they can speak more than one language. Most of you listening cannot. And so the, uh, the fact that they're following instructions in that language, they've got to be super clear. And a couple other things that I've done in the past here. So, so I almost always set an initial deadline of stop working after 3 hours and show me what you've done. Because the other thing is, if your instructions are not clear, you'll find that they'll waffle all over the place and, uh, you know, end up doing a bunch of things differently than what you had originally hoped.

We just did this recently the one, the video editor. I'll go back to it.

I hired 3 people. I gave each of them the same video, the same instructions, and told them each to work on it for 3 hours. And so these people are $5 an hour people. To me, that's a $45 gamble of saying, all right, now I've been able to pick the best one out of those 3 people.

And I didn't have to, you know, I'm lazy. I'm like Karen where like, I don't want to interview them for 3 days. I just want to see their work. And see what comes back, see how they communicate during the process, see what kind of questions they ask. And spending that $45 was worth, uh, not having to spend 2 hours of my time messing around with these guys.

So, um, that's another thing too, is just putting in those clear deadlines and clear expectations and then making sure you have a stopping point for them, especially initially. And always when it comes to— once again, like, we've got some SEO folks we work with where if we left the floodgates open, they would just work, you know, as many hours a week as humanly possible.

And, you know, they'd keep hiring hiring people and adding people. And so it's, you have to be crystal clear on what the expectations are, clarity of tasks, all that fun stuff.

Exactly. And that's the biggest, you know, and there's kind of two sides to this when you are looking for one, because there is, if you're looking for more of a long-term extension of your team, it's going to be a much different, like Matt just said, with doing the video editing, we aren't going to try to make them an extension of our team. That is a strict process that we just need when we get done a video like this, we need them to work on, get it done and shoot it over. Now, our more of the long-term ones, the more— and I should have hit on this earlier— if that's what you're looking for, make sure you are communicating with them outside of Upwork. So that is another one. If they're just contractors working on a project basis, Upwork's fine, communicate through that platform. But if you want them to be the long-term, set them up in your email platform, set them up, you know, group. If you have chats, chat with them, have, you know, making sure that you're just not communicating through Upwork, whatever system you're using, because that's going to make them feel more like a team member. That's going to make them, you know, and that gives you the, the ease of not having to go in there for every little thing. You know, you can put them in your Trello, you can put them in whatever project management system you use. So two sides there of what you're looking for and having to just think of what's the best way for me and for my company and for what I need. To use these contractors or these virtual assistants for.

Yeah, that's a great point.

At any given time, we've got 5 to 10 people that are consistently working with our team, you know, one bordering on full-time all the way down to one who's, you know, 3 to 5 hours every other week and kind of everything in between. And that's the nice thing about this model is that you can dial it in based on skill set..

And so a couple of good resources, you know, 4-Hour Workweek, super old book, but it's a, it's a good, it's probably where the whole tipping point came in virtual assistants when Tim Ferriss sort of introduced this idea of, you know, offshoring work to India and other places. It became a little bit more mainstream.

And then Virtual Freedom by Chris Ducker is very good resource to read when thinking about your strategy for how and when you will leverage virtual assistants offshore and the types of different virtual assistants you can use. He does a really good job of talking about, you know, you've got a general VA, a project manager VA, you got a graphic designer, a web design, you know, he's kind of building his own, his business and walking you through, hey, here are all the different people I use.

And, you know, selfishly, he wrote that book. It's a piece of content that leads you back to— he owns one of those companies I talked about earlier. I think the Headhunter One Virtual Staff Finder, where, you know, he's, he's trying to lead you back to get your VAs from him.

But it's, it's still a good book either way. Um, and there's tons of resources about this. This is not a new thing like we mentioned earlier, but it's definitely something you should have in your arsenal. You should still be concerned about all the things we talked about. Hey, you know, security, uh, language barriers, time zone differences, and you got to dial in your process.

You got to be willing to spend a little bit of money to make some mistakes to understand kind of where you went wrong. But hopefully this was a good guide to get you up and running and help you to avoid some of the mistakes we've made. Over the last few years.

What else would you like to leave the good folks with today, Ms.

Karen?

Just the quick thought of, if you know, you dive in and you start working with all these contractors, is definitely making sure you have more of an accountability chart internally and determining what folks need to be internal and what folks you can sub out. So I think some businesses— I've been reading some different articles about this, just about how some businesses are trying to completely contract-based and completely virtual assistant-based, and they've failed on a lot because they haven't internally hired. So making sure you know clearly what positions you need internally and what positions and what projects you can sub out. You know, it's just an interesting thing I've been kind of looking into is just making sure you're clear on what you want done. And, you know, once you get in there, you're like, oh, I can save a lot of money, or, oh, this is working. But making sure you still know what your internal needs are as well.

Yeah, it's a really good point. And it brings you back to— there's actually one kind of cool, um, I forget who the company was. I was listening to a podcast a couple weeks ago, but the guy was like, at our— you know, they asked him what one of the best things, one of the best perks his company offers was, and they do a virtual assistant for every 2 full-time employees. So for every 2 people, they share a virtual assistant who can do a lot of the administrative work, all the way down to like personal chores and things of research.

And, you know, oh hey, I need to get some flowers for my life, can you, you know, go ahead and order those and have them sent on this date and put this note in there? Like, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, menial tasks that virtual assistants can do. And, you know, that's the structure we're trying to get towards as well, is like, okay, we view this a little bit as a benefit of like, what are some of the things our internal folks don't want to do? Can we offload those in a secure fashion to help them to be better at the core of their job? And so, yeah, really get clear on what your expectations are and how you plan on leveraging remote talent as part of your remote offshore talent as part of your hiring strategy.

So appreciate you as always, Ms. Karen. I appreciate it. What was the cat's name that made a cameo in there?

Uh, Rivi.

Rivi or Ruby?

Rivi. Rivi. R-I-V-I-Y.

Love it. Made it for me.

All right. Find her on Upwork.

See ya.