MBA1492 Are You Paying Too Much For Your VA? + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode here. Who won this week's Free Ride? Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at Ezcourse Co, but you can win it for free.

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Review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. So our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Real business challenges conquered on the daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 NBA a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn. Are you paying too much for your virtual assistant? Hiring a VA is usually one of the first hires a small business does. Especially online businesses. Virtual assistants can really help take care of a lot of the administrative work that's on your plate. A lot of the busy work that's taking a lot of your time. But how much should you be paying for your va? Are you paying too much? Are you not paying enough? We get down to brass tacks and talk about it in today's lesson. Also talk about how to find a great VA for your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of our first hires years ago was a virtual assistant. And it was a great hire because it took off a lot of pressure of doing a lot of administrative tasks in our business. Tedious tasks, emails, spreadsheets, appointments. It is amazing when you can get somebody to take care of all that stuff. But how much should you be paying for a va? The first thing we need to consider is are you hiring a full time or a part time virtual assistant? There are so many things an assistant can do that most small businesses have enough work for a full time position. But it's not the only option. You can always hire a part time VA at the start, but I recommend a full time hire because you're going to get full commitment and you're going to allow them to be able to get used to your tasks, your business, the way you do business a lot more quickly. So for today's purpose, for today's lesson, we're going to be talking about full time hires, how much they cost. Now, many people go to the Philippines. They hire out of the Philippines for a virtual assistant. There's a lot of good reasons why many Filipinos are well educated. Their literacy levels are quite high, their English language ability is quite good. They have a sense of commitment. Many of them are working because they're trying to support families. And whether it's their own, you know, immediate family, their own children and, you know, significant other, or they're trying to support their parents. So hard work is not foreign to the Filipino culture. So many people head to the Philippines, they go to Filipino job sites like onlinejobs, ph to hire a Filipino VA. The other big attraction is the costs. You know, VAs can start as low as US$400 a month for full time work. I know that seems very low, but this is the economy there in the Philippines. And of course, if you decide to hire in a western country, the uk, us, Canada, Australia, you're going to pay a premium because that's the economy there. You're going to need to pay competitive rates there. I've seen VA start at $2,500 a month in the US up to $4,000 $5,000 a month. Now, just like in any position, you're going to pay for experience. So 400 is starting. You know, you're not going to somebody with a lot of experience at the 400 mark in the Philippines. They're going to maybe have some clerical work, maybe they worked in a call center. They're going to need a lot of training. But if you're looking to hire somebody, this is my recommendation, that has done the job before, that has been a VA for somebody, has been an executive assistant with somebody, and can handle many of the tasks that you don't want to handle, whether it's, you know, PayPal payments for affiliates or paying out payroll, or handling email, handling your appointments, all that kind of stuff. A more experienced VA is going to cost, you know, five, six, seven, maybe even $800 a month. Just to give you some perspective on how much that means in the Philippines. The starting salary for a medical doctor in the Philippines is around a thousand US dollars a month. So a highly skilled VA getting paid 800 is pretty good. Of course you can pay them more, you know, 900, 1000 and you can give increments and bonuses and all that kind of stuff. One of the things to keep in mind when it comes to hiring out of the Philippines, family and culture is very important. Time off is a factor. You want to make sure that they get their holidays, they have leave as they can go on vacation or take some time off to be with their family, maternity leave, because many of them are building families, they're having children. And of course like in any position, you want to make sure you pay on time regularly because they depend on the salary just like anybody else. Now it's a whole different ball game if you're hiring out of a western country or a native English speaking country like Australia or Canada or the U.S. or the U.K. and I would recommend looking in one of these countries or in Europe in general if their time zone is close to yours. You want to make sure your VA has the same hours as you. So if you're hiring a Filipino va, you're going to want to meet with them regularly, give them assignments, make sure they're able to maybe take minutes in meetings. And if they're on total opposite time zones as your work schedule, it's really hard. Now many Filipinos are flexible and will work the graveyard shift. This is quite common there. But that's a choice you want to make when you're hiring a VA. So many people hire VAs in the same time zone. So if they live in Australia, you, you know, Philippines is only two or three hours difference. So that works fine. Many people that live in the US will hire out of South America countries like Brazil and Argentina, where they can get a VA for half the price that they would pay if they hired out of the us. People that are on the east coast on the US will hire people in Europe because the time difference is not too bad either. And I know that many people that work or have businesses out of the UK hire many VAs out of Eastern Europe where their English is quite good. And they're willing to work in this position for a below average salary versus a United Kingdom type of salary for a va. Time zones matter. Keep that in mind when you're hiring a va. My general advice when it comes to this topic is you get what you pay for. You want to hire somebody who's experienced, that's going to hit the ground running, that knows what they're doing, that has done it before. You're going to pay a little bit more, but it'll be worth it. You'll save time, you'll save headaches. You'll also get a lot more done. They're able to do more kinds of tasks for you with just simple training, with video tutorials. I shoot videos all the time for Romina, our executive assistant. She's fantastic. I show her, you know, in about five minutes in a video what to do. She creates an sop, which is a standard operating procedure, which basically is. She writes down that procedure so that it's documented in our company. And she implements that task from that point on. And we basically did this over and over and over when we hired her week after week and offloaded many of the tasks that we were doing on a regular basis, which was really tedious and taking a lot of our time. And she's able to take on these tasks quickly and learn them quickly because she's done them before. It's just, you know, in the context of our business. And that's why we're willing to pay above average for a VA from the Philippines, because she's experienced.

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Throughout today's lesson, if you're going to go and search for a VA out of the Philippines, highly recommend the job site onlinejobs.ph they have like a membership system. It's like a fee you pay every month or every three months and you can post as many jobs as you like. It's really a good source for finding a great job online. What's great about that site is there's so many people out of the Philippines that look at that site on a daily basis or on their newsletter. Also post a job on your website. There are so many organizations that scrape websites for job posts and they will repost them on their own site so you'll be able to get more applications. We like to use Google forms for applications so it's easy to filter and look at the forms easily and you can export it to a CSV. So basically when they apply for the job, we tell them to fill out a Google form with a whole bunch of questions, with a whole bunch of test questions. You know, we have them upload their cv, give us all their contact information so we can interview them if they pass the screening. Google forms are a great way to organize the hiring process. Well, there you have it. That wraps up today's lesson. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. But today's lesson is not. Well, there you have it. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Rocky Pen Day. Rocky says I can't imagine my day without the hundred dollar MBA. Ever since I discovered the $100 NBA, I can't wait for the next episode to start my day with. I've only been listening for one month, but now I'm catching up on the back catalog by subscribing. I've already listened to 250 episodes so far. Thanks so much for the great show. Well, thank you Rocky for your review and thanks for subscribing. You heard it from Rocky. When you hit subscribe, you have access to all of our back catalog. All of our over 1400 business lessons is the only way to get access to it. So hit subscribe right now and whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Well, Rocky, your mission is to email me at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with a lifetime membership to EasyCourse, a $500 course we sell over at Easycourse co yours for free. It's a lifetime membership. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A great VA will really allow you to focus on being a great leader, being a great motivator for your team and make the right decisions. A lot of us are bogged down by a lot of busy work. Email, calendars, appointments. It's just overwhelming and you shouldn't be doing that stuff. Hand it over to somebody who is an admin master like a va. Let them handle it. Empower them. Let go of these things and you'll thank me later. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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