Episode 56: Task Management and Virtual Outsourcing with Chris Ducker

Hey, before we start, you know, broadcasting this, what rhymes with ducker? All right, let's go. Let's do this.

Will you just start the recording? Good job almighty. They'll be closed. They'll be closed already.

Continue to spit out her drink.

You're listening to. Hold on.

Come on. Pitiful. Absolutely unprofessional in every way, shape or form.

Now you know what you're in for. Chris.

Chris. You think we're gonna edit this out, too? Wrong.

Oh, damn.

You're listening to the Profit first podcast, episode 56. Oh, bam.

Jeez.

Too good. Holy cow, dude.

This is the first broadcast to be recorded across all continents. We got representatives from the East Pacific all the way to the Colorado mountains.

Wow. That's right. Welcome, everybody, to the It's. Oh, you said what episode it is? 56.

56.

We're happy that you're here. And by the way, you can find us on itunes and Stitcher and Tunein Radio Radio, and of course, the website profitfirstpodcast.com. you can check out all the craziness that has happened in the past 55 or more episodes.

Talking about craziness, the voice you're hearing as our co host, that's Chris Curran, and I'm Mike McAllowitz, the author of Profit First. And what you're listening to today is the Profit first podcast. I bet you already suspect this is going to be an amazing episode. We have a cool guest, Chris Stucker, who's joining us. He's going to teach you everything about going virtual. That's the ultimate kind of source for profitability is being able to virtualize your business, because you have to automate it, you have to systemize it, and you got to be able to outsource stuff to people you never even met face to face. That's what you're going to learn on today's episode. Bam, bam, boom. Oh.

Oh.

And it gives you that bam.

Voice was.

Oh.

Christina Bulldog back.

Good morning.

She's sitting right in front of you, bro.

I know. The middle child.

I'm looking right at her. Well, she almost died on. Is that like hot cocoa? She literally. She's taking a big swig. This morning is record 8am Eastern time. And then Chris Ducker has that one liner, and she almost pukes on the.

Table, all over the microphones, everything.

So, dude, Chris, what have you been up to, bro?

You know, just moving.

Not you, Chris. You see the other Chris.

I always leave our guest unmuted just because it's funny.

Yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna get irritating. So we should just call me Ducker just because I could become so much fun on a show like this very, very quickly. So we should just call me Ducker for the rest of the show.

You've got a deal. It's your. You got Ducker.

So.

So, Curran, what have you been up to?

Yeah, I've been moving. It's been great. I have my whole studio set up and it's just moving is so crazy. There's like a zillion things you have to do and it seems never ending, but. But I'm cool because I'm, you know, I meditate a lot and I'm just. It's letting it unfold. So are you able to do that, Mallowic? Let things unfold?

Not right now, because two words. Tetanus shot, like three days ago. Ouch, my arm.

Yeah, it's still sore.

Ducker, do you hear me? I mean.

Yeah.

Aching like crazy. Yeah, it's like I took a punch to the face. Oh, yeah.

Why would you be getting a tent in the shoulder?

No, it just migrated up that way. I took it in the shoulder and now my neck is sore and my face contorted.

Okay.

All right.

Before we officially introduce Mr. Ducker, I want to thank our sponsors. Fundera. Right. Who else? We got Christina T Sheets, Bam.

And nextiva.

Yep, those are three corporate partners. We also had one that did a little trial run with us. It's successful, but we haven't been able to schedule a fob call. Actually, I think you just scheduled.

I did.

So I got a fob called Close Them Down. And there's another one. They were at our conference, First Global Con. I'm going to close K down. If she's listening to this. Get it? So we're gonna have two more sponsors by the. Hopefully within a month or so. All right, enough wasting and killing time. Let's talk about our guests and let's get serious here, please. Chris Ducker is the author, the best selling author of Virtual Freedom. Originally from the UK, he now lives in the Philippines for 50. Oh, I thought he said for 15 year olds. For 15 years.

Chris lives in the.

This is a typo here. He lives in the Philippines.

You do want me to stick around for the rest of the show, right?

I do, I do. I just misread that. And he listen, he is the mastermind. He is the genius behind going virtual.

He.

If there is a single authority in the world around this, it's Chris Ducker. Chris, welcome officially now to the show.

Oh, thank you, sir. Look at that. I like that. High five, bro. Yes. So good. Just keep. Keep the chairs going just for another five seconds or so. There we go.

All right.

I love you. Look at this. He's taking.

I need to get one of those buttons for when I'm on stage at conferences. I need. I need to do that.

Oh, we have lots of different.

We have.

He's a crowd control.

Different sound effects here. So, Chris, how the hell did you ever get into virtual. The virtual vertical anyway? How did you get into that?

Well, I mean, you know, I kind of. It's not like I really kind of chased it down or anything like that. Like, I kind of stumbled into it. So late 2009, I burned out. Like, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs do. I was working those silly 16 hours a day for about four years or so building the business. And so I did. I burned out. And 2010, I created this virtual CEO goal for myself that I wanted to put in place to become fully removed from my business by the end of 2010. And so what it is, I started blogging about it, started podcasting about it, started building a community in regards to the whole let's run our business virtually type of mentality. By the end of the year, I'd hired eight people to ultimately replace myself from my business. I'd gone from 16 hours a day, seven days a week pretty much to now what I'm at now, 10am to 4pm Monday through to Thursday. I don't work Fridays. I haven't done since 2000 and late 2012. And so, you know, we quadruple the business at the same time, so.

Yeah, but you live in a shoebox now.

Yeah.

Can you. Can you make money working so few hours?

I can. Because, you know, I've genuinely. I've got to the point where I've continued to really do what I do best, and that's focusing on the growth strategies, focusing on client outreach, focusing on building up the brand for the business and for myself. And it's amazing how much my own personal brand has become the number one driving force behind the growth of all the businesses. So, yeah, I mean, you totally can. I mean, I've just. Honestly, I've got to the point now where I've just become predominantly quite lazy. And I want to get to the point where, literally where everything hits my desk or lands my inbox, the first thing I say to myself now is, can someone else do this? Because that's the mentality I've created within the businesses. And so, yeah, you know, it's, it's a nice place to be in now. I mean, I haven't been in this particular position for very long. It's only really been the last few years where I've truly taken myself out of the business. And that's now I get the chance to write books and do more speaking and travel and do all that stuff. And it wasn't always like that. So once you've been on the dark side, when you get over to the light side, it becomes a little nicer, just lifestyle in general.

Chris, was it hard for you to kind of let go of all the control of your business and to kind of step back and focus on what you wanted to do?

Yes, yes, it was. Because I'm a small business owner. You know, I was, I was a. I was your typical micromanaging, you know, you know, real micromanaging, pain in the ass boss.

So how did you make the transition?

Well, well, I mean, trust me, when you hit a wall, not physically, not literally, but when you hit a wall as an entrepreneur at 180 miles an hour and burn out the way I did in late 2009, I mean, I was in hospital for a week. I lost a ton of weight. I was on liquids, I was on Valium so I could sleep. I mean, it was like, it was a serious, messed up, like, medical situation. And when you've been in that position in, it knocks a living hell out of you. And so, you know, I knew something had to give. And the more and more I started talking with other entrepreneurs, I realized that they were on one side of the coin or the other. So on one side of the coin it was, they were, they were, they were literally on the verge of burnout. Like, they could feel it coming, or they had already smartened up a little bit and were already building their team and delegating and not having to do everything themselves.

Do you mind just rewinding so our listeners know, what was your business up to 2009? What were you doing?

So what I was doing, I was running a call center facility here in the Philippines. We opened up in 2014, sorry, 2004, I should say. And we worked predominantly with a local market for a few years, working with the large international banks here like hsbc, Citibank, Standard Chartered. And we were basically working with those guys on their local credit card and personal loan acquisitions as their agency. But that kind of became a very saturated market going into 20, 27, 28. And so basically what we did is we started to kind of just morph and Change into more of an international call center. So we would work with a lot of people from the United States, from the uk, from Australia and elsewhere in Europe. And that's all we do, 100% kind of international. We don't have a single client locally. But I mean up until that point we were, you know, we were doing about, I don't know, probably about 1.2, 1.3 million a year. Nice little business turning over a decent profit margin with me working 16 hours a day and about 130 staff.

Just so I understand what the business was exactly was this. If I call my credit card company, say, to activate my phone and says, you want to talk to someone, push zero. It was connecting to your, to you guys out there.

It was, it was things like that. But we were also doing a lot of outbound lead gen work as well. So let's say you're a website design company and you've got, you know, 50,000 B2B leads to call in whatever the New York area or whatever. And you know, we would call those numbers and get people warmed up and generate those leads in terms of, yes, I want my website redesigned or you know, yes, I'm still living in 1986 and Geocities isn't quite working for me anymore, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, and that was kind of where it all kind of began. But now, like I said, you know, now we're multi, multi seven figure annual revenue business and we are 400 plus staff and the owner of the business spends less than three hours a week in the facility and he works the rest of the time at this house.

So when you say multi, multi. So you're 20, 30, $40 million in revenue now.

Yeah, I wish it was that high. But it's, it's, it's predominantly, it's predominantly more than what we were doing back in 2010.

Okay, okay. Yeah, so yeah, I guess seven figures would be like 5, 6, 7, 8 million if I, if I really think for a second.

So.

Okay, fascinating. You're working 16 hours a day. Every listener. And we have all these entrepreneurs that are trying to grow their businesses. They're, they're right in the spot. You are, they're working 16 hours a day. How can you shift from 16 hours a day to, you know, six hour days, four days a week? I mean now you're working 24 hours. How do you make that transition? It sounds impossible.

Well, you make it slowly. You appreciate and understand that it's not going to happen overnight. You know, you got to not drink your own Kool Aid and think that you can get out of what you got yourself into by clicking your fingers or swallowing a quick pill. It doesn't work that way. And one of the easiest ways to kind of get into that mindset shift a little bit is to sit down and do what I call my three list of freedom exercise. And this was at the beginning of virtual freedom in the book and actually popped up quite regularly throughout the course of the book as well, because it's an important factor of actually just beginning to have that, that, that simple mindset shift. Do you want me to go over it real quick?

Yeah. Heck yeah, dude. Nice cliffhanger.

All right. Okay. And I love the way.

Do you need music or a build?

No, no, no. Well, I mean, if you have any. If drummer on Chris or anything.

I have game show music. Yeah, Chris.

Yes.

Let's do it. So good. Either that or Rocky fanfare Kind of, you know, one of those training montage music. Wait, don't. Don't kill the atmos mic. We'll break it down. So it's very easy exercise. A lot of people think that these kind of things are incredibly long winded and you've got to like, blank out hours and hours and hours, you know, out of your schedule. It's not the case. You can actually get started with literally a cup of coffee in 30 minutes. So what you do is you get a piece of paper and you draw two lines down it, creating three columns. Okay. In the first column, you put down all the tasks that you're handling on a daily basis, maybe a weekly basis that you hate doing. That's an important word. Hate is a very powerful word. And you know what I'm talking about. The kind of tasks that when you think about doing them, you just like, want to, you know, go home, seal the windows, and turn on the gas. You know what I mean? Like, it's. I want to. I want to do myself in kind of thing.

Right. So your appearance on this show would be. Listen.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it. So you just know me.

You just know bro.

I knows me. I know, bro. And I love the way that this is like the one show that I've been on with the word bro and dude has been said more than the word business.

Oh, come on, dude.

I think it's great.

I love it, bro.

It's okay, bro. It's okay, bro. Don't worry. It's all right. We're current, bro. So. So anyway, so that's the first List, list of all the things that you hate doing, but you got to do them because your business ultimately demands them of you, right? The second list is a list of all the things that you struggle to do or you can't do. You know, all out that you can't do it. Now this is what I call superhero syndrome. Comes into play a little bit because we believe that we're our own superhero in our own little universe of business land, right? And that we can do everything. And you've got to again, you've got to get over yourself, not drink that Kool Aid that you've created for yourself and throw it away and say, you know what, there are certain things that I suck at. And being that having that kind of self awareness is very, very, very important. So that's the second list. List of all the things that you struggle with doing or you just plain can't do. And you know it. But the third list is by far the most important. The third is the game changer. The third list will literally change your life because it changed mine. And I've seen it change hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people's as well since the book has come out. And very simply, what you do in that third column is you make a list of all the things that as the business owner that you are, regardless of what industry you're in or who you're serving, but as the business owner that you are, a list of all the things you feel you shouldn't actually be doing. Now the reason why this is so important, this last list, is because going back to lists one and two, you might actually love doing these tasks, okay? You might actually be incredibly good at doing these tasks. But the question you've got to ask yourself, and this is why it's such a game changer, is should I be doing it or can my time, which is our most valuable commodity, right? Can I, can I palm those tasks off to other people so that I can spend more time on more high level activities like strategizing for growth or coming up with new products or services, or spending, you know, more time with my top 20% clientele because they're going to bring 80% of my money every year, you know, those sort of types of things. And that's why that third and that final list is the most important. So that's the three lists of freedom.

Can you give us an example, when you did this for yourself, of what you put in that shouldn't be doing columns?

Business development.

Oh, interesting, right? I mean, isn't that the most important role of the owner of the business.

Yeah. And I mean, if I may be so bold, I'm bloody good when it comes to sales and marketing. I've been doing.

May not be so bold. We don't want to hear, okay, this.

Is, this is not the place.

Don't do that. Don't do that here, bro.

Yeah, bro. So, so how do you get business.

Development off your plate? Yeah, tell us about it.

I hire someone in the United States to do it for me. Plain simple. Someone who had a little less experience than me, but someone who was not in love with himself too much, that he wasn't wanting to listen to me, to tell him what worked and what didn't work with our business, with our industry, with our prospects. And so, you know, it was tough, I'll be honest with you. You know that that whole year for me was an extremely hard transition because I made that very, very hard, fast. And last goal of by the end of 2010, I don't want to be in the day to day running of the business. I want to lead the business. I don't want to run it. The business is running me now, God damn it. I want it the other way round. And so basically that's what I did. I had to let go of a lot of things. I was also the one person doing all of the training because I've been involved in telemarketing game the whole of my career. So it was really hard for me to let go of that because I know what to say on the telephone to get people's, you know, to get people's attention. I mean, Mike, I think, actually I remember, I think it was on your old show, remember when I gave you the tip of calling in early, early or hitting the wrong extensions to be passed through to the right person. Remember that little sneak around.

I do remember that sneak.

Couple years ago.

Yeah.

You know what? I think you were on my show and I dropped it. And then you did a video clip.

For your YouTube and I claimed as my own idea.

Yeah, of course you would.

Yeah, in typical fashion.

No, to paraphrase it, I remember you said, at least this is how I remember. Call the, the whoever your prospect is, call that main number, intentionally dial the wrong extension, say, oh, I was trying to get hold of Christina Bulldog.

I.

Something must have happened. Could you patch me through? And now you have a qualified internal person making the introduction for you.

That's it? Yeah, that's it. And that, believe it or not, that's.

You are a real world.

Oh, yeah. I was a real mother ducker back in the day.

Yeah.

But yeah, so that, that for me, that's, that was the biggest thing for me to let go of was the biz dev because, you know, I, how do you teach it?

You mastered it. How do you teach?

That was the whole thing. You can't. And that's why I had to hire somebody with 10 plus years of biz dev experience and sales experience, somebody who was also selling B2B services. Totally different game. It was actually in the Internet game. But he, he knew what it's like to pitch small business owners a service based, recurring monthly, you know, business model. And all I needed to do was just, you know, honestly, all I really did, I spent like two hours on Skype with the guy, just giving him all the one liners, all the sales strokes that I knew worked with our prospects. And you know, he did what a lot of business development people will do in their first month in a brand new industry. He burned a crapload of leads that I probably would have closed. But you know, going into the second month he opened a couple of nice accounts. Into the third month he does the same thing. And a year later we're putting an extra hundred seats in the call center and so on and so on and so on. And that person is still actually working with me now, five years later. But he's on a commission only basis right now, not a monthly retainer because we're at maximum capacity pretty much. We've got like 20 empty seats in the facility. And I don't want to continue to grow that particular business anymore. So if a, if a client does drop out, which doesn't happen very often, I'll give them a call and say, hey, we got, you know, 15 seats to fill. Get to work. And he'll usually do it within a month or two.

But so it sounds, what you're suggesting sounds totally contrary to what I hear. Everyone says put systems in place, make a McDonald's, you know, you can take any, anyone off the street can come in and start flipping hamburgers. What I just heard from you is just give them the basic outline of what we need to achieve. Give them some tips and let the person learn on their own.

Well, with that particular role, you know what I mean? Like selling is an art form. Remember the old movie Glengarry Glen Ross where they have the sign in the background of the office there where it says salesmen are born not made.

Or the line when he goes, put the coffee down.

Yes. Such a good movie that was. Yes, you Know what it takes to sell real estate? Takes brass balls to sell real estate, you know. Such a great line.

Look.

Look at my watch. You see this watch?

Yes.

My watch is worth more to me. I can't remember more. What was it worth more than your car? I can't really say.

Yeah, I drove an $80,000 BMW to get here tonight. What did you drive? Hyundai. So good. Anyway, we could go all night on that one.

Yeah.

So sales is, yeah, you know, very heavy skill set, type of roles. You've got to do what I call onboarding. You don't necessarily train someone like a web developer comes in at, you know, to do something for you. You're not a web developer. What are you going to train them in? Not you're going to onboard them properly in terms of your internal systems and processes for things like, you know, updating where they are on their project or checking in at the end of the week or whatever it is. Same with a graphic designer. I know what I want something to look like, but I can't use Photoshop to save my own life. So I'll just say this is roughly what I'm looking for and let them get to work. So, you know, there are certain things that you have to. And training, I think, is a very broad term anyway, when you're talking about staff, because there's so many different roles and so many different businesses and so many different countries around the world, it's always changing. It's a parameter that's about as variable as you can get. So, you know, really, it really comes down to onboarding people properly and making sure that even if they are virtual and on the other side of the world, they're part of your team. And even if they do have the skillset, even if they do have the experience, even if they do have the right mindset that will fit into your company culture and vision, if you don't onboard them properly, they will never know what you like and how you like things done. So it's more onboarding than it is training per se.

Let's dive a little more into the virtual stuff because folks listening in, they want to become more profitable. Virtual employees seem like a great opportunity. How does someone start going about this if you've never had a virtual office before?

Well, the first thing you do is that three lists of freedom. Because you can't start unless you know what you're going to outsource or delegate. Right. So that's the most important thing. What happened is when you, when you're done with that exercise, you'll fundamentally create a very loose blueprint for what you want to outsource and what you want to keep internal. So, you know, there might be certain tasks like a logo being designed or maybe transcription done, for example, from a podcast episode that you want to turn into an ebook to give away as an opt in magnet on your website or something along those lines.

Right.

So there's a lot of different sort of ways to skin that kind of task, Cat. But you know, what I really advocate is the role based outsourcing and building an actual genuine team of people. And at that point, you've got to hire for the role, not for the task. And that means you hire a plumber to do a plumber's job. You don't hire an electrician and expect him to plumb a little bit on, on the side because it doesn't work that way. You know, I certainly would not allow a roofer to wire my bloody house up, right? And vice versa because the house would blow up or there'd be lots of holes in the roof. So you got to hire for the role, not for the task. And that is, believe it or not, the biggest mistake that everybody that I come across when they, when they say, oh, this whole virtual assistant malarkey is a load of bollocks. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't agree, I don't agree with it. It's not possible. I've tried and failed. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That's because you want one person to do five people's jobs. It's the biggest mistake I see. I call it the myth of the super Va because it doesn't exist.

Well, first I got to say thank you for using the word malarkey. We haven't had that one thrown around since 1950. Malarkey.

Malarkey. What about bollocks? You didn't say, well, that's a British, That's a British.

That's never made across the channel. But.

I think Michael. I'm pretty sure Michael Caine has dropped it in at least one film that you've probably.

Yeah, does, but, you know. So tell me about. Where do you find your virtual folks?

It depends again. Yeah, it depends on the type of things that you're wanting to ask. If it's just task based, then you can do something like Elance or Odesk, which have now merged and they're called Upwork. Probably the worst rebranding effort I've seen in recent history. I don't know what that's all about. And I wonder how many thousands of dollars or tens of thousands they paid whoever agency they hired for that one. Anyway, so you can go to a website like up or freelancer.com if it's graphic based. You can go to 99designs.com and everything, everything works brilliantly. And you just post up a job description, you hire the person. What is all these little I can hear noises?

Yeah, that's, that's Chris.

No, someone just jumped in on your source connect line. Anyway, continue.

So anyway, bottom line is that, you know, these are one off tasks that you can go to a website, like one of those job posting sites, post up your job, interview a few applicants, and a lot of the time it's just done on scoring and things like that online. You never even talk to the person they'll do the job. You pay the task and you're off to the races. That's the easiest way to get going.

Do you hear of his new program called Fancy Hands? We tried that out here.

I was thinking about that.

Yeah, have you heard of that?

Yeah. Fancy Hands is more of a kind of virtual concierge. Am I right in saying that?

Yeah, yeah, you said very sexually. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, something like that will help you sort of day to day with, you know, a few things you need done here and there. But I mean, like, when you talk about real business growth, you know, you need, you need a member of your team. You really need to have a, you know, a team that you can turn to that you can, you know, rely upon to do the work as and when you need it. And you know, something like Fancy Hands. And I don't, I've never used a service, but I'm sure, I mean, they're still in business, they got to be doing something right somewhere for someone. You know, the fact is, you know, something like that is good for some people. For me, I prefer to have my own team. Because when you work with somebody through Fancy Hands, you can build a great relationship with them. But what if Fancy Hands decides to fire them or they decide to leave and now you're stuck and you've lost your va and you're back at sort of at the beginning of it. Hiring your own people is where it's at as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, that's a great, that's a great point. Yeah. Fancy Hands, we used it to kind of dip our toe in the water. It was a moderate success. We couldn't justify it, so we stopped using it. Is there a way to dip a toe in the Water. Maybe that's better than that. If you never use virtual services before, you've never worked with someone virtually before, is there a way to get started so you can get comfortable with it? Because I assume you as the employer, if that's the term to use, have to change your model just like you have with this, this three step strategy.

Yeah, I mean, believe it or not, there's not that much difference between working with somebody physically in the same office or somebody over the other side of the world, except time zones obviously. And except for the fact that you're never really with each other physically, everything else is basically the same. And you think about the way that you work within your business right now. How do you delegate a task? You email it, how do you get feedback on it? You might get on Skype, maybe you're on Slack, maybe you get another email back. Maybe you check it on a project management system like Basecamp or Asana. You know, you very rarely, for all intents and purposes, having an office, I think right now for most small business owners, unless they actually require in person meetings with their clients on a very, very, very regular basis, I think pretty much every small business owner in the world could go virtual tomorrow and it won't really affect their business all that much. Plus they'll have less outgoings and end up making more profit.

Yeah. So I like, I love that. But here's my challenge. Back to you is what about the energy? So here at our offices, when a new member joins our organization, we play thunderstruck. There's a party, people are high fiving. There's just an energy and culture that comes out of that. Do you lose that when you go virtual?

I mean, obviously you're going to lose a little bit, aren't you? Right. Because you're not physically with each other. But that doesn't mean that you can't get onto, you know, some kind of, you know, virtual conferencing, you know, like a go to meeting type setup or it doesn't mean like we. Yeah, video conferencing. Like so, I mean like for example, we have Yammer. I don't know whether you guys have ever checked that out. Yammer.com it's like Facebook for companies. Right? And it really looks like Facebook like a lot and the feel of it and all the rest of it. Everybody has to have the same domain name email address to access. And what we use Yammer for is we do not discuss business at all inside of Yammer. It's purely for team morale. It's like Our virtual water cooler. And so on Monday we'll come in and we'll post photos of what we did over the weekend and we'll see people talking about doing this or doing that or it's this birthday party and all that sort of stuff. So. And there's a chat facility to that as well, so we can chat there. And I encourage all this stuff. Like I'd rather than be doing that than messing around on bloody Facebook, you know what I mean? So.

Right.

You know that, that's kind of how we kind of create that. And yeah, we get onto. And here's the other thing I should state. And this is, you know, one of the benefits of being where I am. I'm in the Philippines and all of my virtual staff, full time virtual staff are in the Philippines. I have a content creator, a content writer rather in the United States. In San Diego, I have a kind of an events manager slash speaking agent that's based out of Australia. And then I work with a virtual PA in the UK for certain bits and pieces every month as well. So other than those three people, my entire virtual team are in the Philippines, but they're spread out hardly. I mean like nine people virtually around the country. Obviously we have the facility for the call center and everything where there's 400 people in there. But in terms of the online side of everything that I do, and we're probably kind of, you know, be most attractive for the majority of your listeners. They're spread out all over the country. And I do make it a point every four months to meet up with them in Manila. So I get on a plane, I go an hour north and we all meet up and we spend a couple of nights with each other. We go bowling, we go karaoke, we'll work for an entire day together. I get a meeting room in a nice hotel. We work all together as a team once, you know, three times a year we do that and you know, it works. Well. Now not everybody that's overseas has the ability to do that. However, I do always suggest that after a certain period of time, if you've got staff in another country and it makes sense for you to go ahead and visit them and you feel like it's something that will help the relationship continue to grow and foster. It's worthwhile taking the trip, you know, pulling back the tax refund on it and having a bit of a suntan when you come home as well.

No, I like that. So is there a certain country that the, the, the pricing, the, the costs of labor is to such an advantage that we, when we're going virtual, should consider hiring people from India or Russia or whatever.

India I suggest you stay away from.

You don't like the food?

It's a deli. It's Delhi belly, baby. Delhi belly. No, I, I, I genuinely feel like they've lost their footing in this world.

Interesting.

They had it back in, you know, 2007. 8, 9, 10. The four hour workweek literally catapulted their entire industry. Like Tim Ferriss. You know, they owe Tim Ferriss a hell of a lot. But no, I, I mean I've, you know, I've been in the outsourcing industry over a decade now and with the virtual assistant world for six years coming up pretty much consistently and I have seen India very slowly but surely let that side of things slip through their fingers. A couple of reasons why, number one, they became so cheap, they were just beating everybody down on price that eventually it ended up with them just getting the work for doing the work sake. They weren't even really making any money out of it. And if you're not making money out of whatever it is you're doing, you're doing it in a half assed approach anyway. So, so they started losing clients because of that fact. The other reason is because of communication difficulties. Yeah, they all speak English but you know, the varying level of the quality of it is not something that you want to have to deal with if you're a busy small business owner. And the other thing I've also noticed of working with, you know, Indian VAs in India is that man, they will write a 200 word paragraph instead of a 40 word sentence to describe something like their technical. Written English is a big waste of time and a time suck as well. So that's the reason why I would stay away from India. The Philippines by far is the number one destination of choice when it comes to outsourcing. Now whether it be admin work, medical transcription, I'll tell you right now, the large majority of large facilities, clinics and practices in the United States that need to keep records, which is like 99.9% of them, they will, I'm telling you, they're pretty much all outsourcing the medical transcription work to the Philippines where you will have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of registered nurses. Okay? Nursing is one of the biggest degree courses to take here in the, in the Philippines. They started taking it two, three decades ago to get out of the Philippines to go work as a nurse elsewhere to make good money, send the money back to the Family. But now things have changed in the last decade, particularly in the last five years, where now registered nurses no longer have to leave their families and go to a foreign land. They can make brilliant money doing medical transcription work.

Hmm, fascinating.

So that's, you know, that's one thing. And then, you know, you've got the. The very kind of Americanized slang and English when they speak over here as well. You can go to a. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think bro. Actually, I'm pretty sure bro and dude is used quite regularly. Yeah, sweet.

Yeah.

And sweet from time. On occasion. On occasion, you might get the odd sweet. Yes.

Hey, let me ask you this. We got a rock and roll if. If folks want to learn more about you or spend some time with you. Manila. How do they hook up with you, Chris?

Well, chrisducker.com and that's where. That's where we do. That's what we're all about. ChrisDucker.com @ChrisDucker on Twitter.

And for God's sake, listeners, pick up his book. It is amazing. It's called Virtual Freedom. It's on Amazon. It's at your favorite bookstore. It's all over the Philippines. Pick it up, Chris. Absolute pleasure having you, bro.

High five, bro.

High five.

You got it, dude. And, you know, can I just say that I thoroughly enjoyed. I thoroughly enjoy being current with you guys.

Oh, you're a wonderful guy. All right, man, I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, Chris.

Take good care, everybody.

Bye, bye.

Bye. Bye. All right. Chris Curran.

Yes.

Christina.

Wow.

Give me the. Give me the one big takeaway. I'm gonna start off with Chris Curran.

Wow. The one big takeaway. I liked when he talked about the difference between onboarding. Oh, wait, are we going to talk about our corporate sponsors?

Oh, yeah. That was the tease. That was the tease. Good job. You played that out perfectly. Corporate partners. First, I want to thank Fundera One Stop Shop. Right? So if you need funding for your entrepreneurial endeavors to grow your business, call Fundera Go actually on their website. Why Call Go on their website? They shop out the funding for you and get the money for you. And they actually did a turnaround for one of our clients, I think, in 24 hours or less. And big loan, too, was like, you know, hundreds of thousands. They're quick. They're quick. That plays into Chris's little theme there. The second one's T sheets, time tracking software. We use it here. I don't even want to see the T sheet records coming through because we just had our big conference. I saw. Yeah. So all these hours are coming. I'm like, oh my God.

All day, every day.

Yeah, yeah. Lots of hours from our team. But it's cool because it's real time reporting so you can budget accordingly and there's a lot more functionality to it. And then of course, nextiva, we just ordered two new phones from them. We had, I thought we had a problem yesterday and we did. The problem was me, I was dialing the number wrong. I called nextiva. They spent, I don't know, half hour on the phone with me saying, testing everything, said we don't experience that problem. And then he asked, he walked me through the process I was following and figured out that I was actually doing it wrong. They're a great support team. They're a great support company and they'll stay with you on the phone as long as necessary. And even when you, the user me was totally, totally messing up, they don't slap you in the face with that one.

And if you don't have time to call them, just send them an email and they'll call you when it's convenient. Oh, super. Awesome.

I love it, bro.

Well, I'm not a bro, dude.

You're a sister from another mister. Hey, Chris, what's your big takeaway, brah?

Yeah, so the, the difference between onboarding and training, I think was huge. And a big part of that he said, was role based outsourcing. So instead of hiring someone just to do a specific task, like if you're more clear on what kind of person you need, what role you need on your team, then you can hire person based on their role. And then like he said, when you bring them on board, you don't have to train them to do things because they already have skills. They just need to fit into your team. I thought that was, that was a good distinction. I think in general this conversation is important. I think I can speak personally. I. There's a lot of things I wish I could outsource and do, but I don't know how to do it and I'm not clear enough on it. I think that's what his. Also his three. Three lists, I forget what he called.

It, but three lists of freedom.

Yeah. That is for clarity. Right. Clarity is what we need, I think, before we actually start doing something. Because clarity then gives us confidence.

I love it. Christina, what'd you learn?

Well, following up on that, I mean, delegation, he was reiterating it was important because every business owner almost has that control freak gene inside of them. When you start your business, it's Your baby, you want to do everything, and as you grow, you physically can't. So you need to just kind of use those, that list that he was talking about to really figure out what it is that you can pass on to other people so you can focus on what you should be in your business.

Yeah, and the should's the big word, right? He said, make the shouldn't be doing list, and that's a tough question. Internal conversation with yourself. You know, I'm on the same theme here. My takeaway is define the output. Start with the end goal in mind. But hey, listener, get the speaker real close to your face, because I gotta have a conversation with you. I'm getting a little fired up here. Find what you want. But here's the deal. If what you're doing hasn't been getting you to what you want, stop doing that. It's time to change and try something new. And I suggest maybe going virtual. This show is produced virtually.

Yes. And also to dip your toe in the water, consider using a virtual accountant or bookkeeper.

Oh, gosh, Christina, way to bring that one back. Private first professionals dot com. Oh, yeah.

Love it.

Not only a bookkeeper account, they will drive profitability in your business. All right, man, we got to rock and roll and get out of here.

There's a thought. Geez. Profitability, right? Holy cow. Yeah. So great job, you guys. Thanks again to Chris Ducker. This has been a lot of fun. Check out our website, Profit first podcast dot com. You can see all our previous guests. We've had some. Some doozies.

Yeah. Some great shows. Hal Elrod is one of the most popular guests. Roger Dooley. We talked about brain science. We talked about getting up earlier in the morning. All these things point back to a more profitable business.

That's right. So I'm Chris Curran. If you want to find out more about me and all and podcasting, go to fractalrecording.com it'll be in the show Notes and Mike Michalowicz. Tell us.

Yeah, And, Christina, we're the Profit First Professionals team here. We got a whole little organization running out of a physical office, and we have a membership now of 100 members. Oh, one second. Members of bookkeepers, accountants throughout the globe who drive profit in your business. You need an accountant. You need a bookkeeper in your business. There's no question about it. But you need one that can drive profit in your business. So Visit us at profitfirstprofessionals.com Click on Find a Profit First Professional. We'll hook you up and have someone that's helping your business explode in profitability.

That's it. Thanks again for listening, everybody. Check out all our past episodes. And in the meantime, please be profitable.

Exactly.

Please.

Take care of yourself and visit Manila. I'm going to go to Manila now. I want to hang out there.

All right. See you guys.

Later, bro.

Later, bro.