Hiring A VA - Success School

Hey guys, welcome to the hiring a VA module. In particular, we're talking about hiring a overseas VA here. So I know you, you're more. You're most likely doing small tasks, maybe tasks that you shouldn't be, to grow your business instead of focusing on the high return on investment tasks, not $5 an hour tasks. That's the whole point of this module, is to hire someone to do those manial or repetitive tasks that you don't need to do so you can free up your mind space to do the tasks that are going to grow the needle in your business. So a couple of notes on hiring before I get into the process and how you do this is, you know, like anything in life is, you get what you pay for. So the ranges that I've hired, a general VA is what we're talking about here, not a specific VA is $3 to $10 an hour. My best VA currently that I have is $6.50 and that's USD, so convert that out, it's about $10 an hour AUD, which is fine. So the most important aspect of this is you need to hire and upskill them. I'm, I'm a real like believer in throwing someone in the deep end and seeing if they can swim. That's my tactic with VA's is I hire a general VA using the protocol that I give you and then I will upskill them or I'll ask them to upskill themselves to complete the role. Okay, so that's how I've ended up with a $6.50 USD an hour VA that basically runs my entire gym on the back end. So she does admin, she writes the training programs in Train Heroic. I wrote the program, she enters it in, she managed my podcast, edits it, adds in, intro, outros, all that type of stuff, publishes it to Libsyn, writes a bio, sends the email, all that stuff. She does email marketing. So I'll give tell her what to do and she'll go and execute it. Text marketing, social media. So in terms of social media, I give her an outline, she goes and executes three posts a day for our social media. Literally anything that you can think of that is a $5 an hour task she can do. She's even gone as far as like chasing failed payments, organizing the governing bodies of those things. She's a personal like VA as well. So if I need to send someone flowers or buy them a gift or anything like that, she does that as well. So that's the potential and opportunity you have. Imagine you have someone for 20, 30, 40 hours a week doing those types of tasks for you can imagine how far and how successful your business is going to be. So a couple of fears with hiring a VA is the first one is they're going to steal my shit. And I hear this all the time. It's just a complete lack of trust. So Jon Jones is the founder of Upwork. Sorry, not Upwork onlinejobs ph. And he has a. A couple of blog posts on this. Essentially like the same governing laws or the laws around stealing, virtually the same in the Philippines. So if they were to steal off you, the police would have the same powers. The VAs know that as well. So they generally. I haven't heard of anything where any VAs have stolen anything or messed up anything, like legally. So there is. You have that power as well in your corner and they know that as well. So. So I've hired probably like 40, 50Vs in the last 8 years. Never had an issue with any of them. The next one is people are gonna know it's not me. So I have had my VA act as me on Instagram, on Facebook, in emails, and I'm talking like on my personal accounts, not just on business accounts. So on my personal accounts, on my personal Facebook, personal Instagram, personal email address, she will pose as me, go through my emails, replies me, reply to my messages, send out messages as me the whole time. Okay. So people have never not known it's not me is what I'm trying to say is they can mimic you as well very well if you want to declare that it is not you. For, you know, if you hire them for a admin position in your business and you say that the admin, that's fine too. But you know, they can know that people oftentimes will not not believe that it's not you talking from your accounts. Okay. Which is a really key distinction here. The next one is they are not as good as me. And the story I'd like to give with this is I just hired a operations manager in my marketing agency and I asked her to do a IQ test before they started. And the thing with an IQ test is I don't know if you guys have ever done one, but you get pretty surprised with your score, whether that's good or bad. So mine was 130something and my VA is actually her IQ is higher than mine, which was a little bit concerning for me at the start. But then I thought if I have someone smarter than me in the business on an IQ point of view, the Business will rocket, which it has and it does. So oftentimes they're not not as smart as you. They can be better, but they're not meant to be. You know, this is a three to ten dollar an hour role, therefore you'll get someone in that level of intelligence. If you're expecting someone to be Einstein or be as good as you, you need to be expected to pay, pay quite considerable amount of money. And they probably won't be working for you anyway if they are that smart. So something you just need to know, the other one is they're taking away jobs in my country. So there's many ways you can look at this. You can look at this from like a philosophical point of view of, you know, like our country is best or wherever you guys are from and we want to keep the work in the country. But government makes it quite hard to succeed financially if that is your view point for yourself. So you need to just toss up that factor. If that's an issue for you internally or it's not, that's fine too. I'm not going to get too deep into this, but this module is for you. If you're keen on hiring someone from the Philippines or offshore, you can use the same process for this. So a key consideration, like one of my specialties is, is building businesses so they don't run without me. Once a business is running well, most of the day to day can be managed by a good va. And I know that might be quite hard to believe, but at some point in your business, if you want to have a business that runs without you, you need to take your hands off the wheel, let it run, see what happens, and a good VA can make that happen for you. Then if something goes wrong, you know what to fix and how to fix it. But if you're constantly micromanaging these people, not letting them do their job, you're never going to have the business that you guys want, okay? And everyone wants a business where you can go on holiday and make money. That's what I do and that's my specialty. And this is part of the way that I do it. So currently in my gym I have my main VA. She does about 30 hours a week, runs all the backend podcasts, social media, everything. The only thing I do in the gym is write the programs at the moment, some Facebook ad stuff. So it's about three hours. Then we have the western component of the gym where I have an operations manager and a head coach and they run everything else. So that's essentially All I'm doing this business runs entirely without me. Besides programming, which takes me about an hour on Sundays, I'll do a team meeting on Monday, vibe check, morale check, et cetera. But essentially the gym is running without me. My other company marketing company is run 100 without me and it's all run by Vas. So. So we have a. Currently we have a team of six that are in that marketing agency. They're on everything from client management to doing the actual work for the clients as well. This is fully systemized and gives me a way. So that's two instances I've given you where it's completely possible for VAS to be running a very good portion of your business or running the entire business depending on what the business is. Obviously if you have some client facing stuff that you need to run in person or it's there's westerners involved in that, that's not going to be possible. But a large chunk or a chunk can be run by virtual assistants which is incredible. All the tools I'm going to give you in Success score, especially in the scale section is going to make that possible. You just need to implement it and obviously make enough money to afford to run that. But you know, if you set up your businesses correctly, I get a wage from two companies at the moment I'm all three including Success school and my total hours is less than three a week. On the other two companies obviously Success Score is a little bit more than that. So it's completely possible for you to do that and build businesses that run without you. So I'm going to run through a step by step of this. When you are doing this, you will follow this process yourself. I would strongly suggest sticking to this process. This is just the way I've worked this out and so you get the best candidates. So we'll have a scorecard from the previous module. You guys should have done scorecards by now and you'll build one out for this role. Job description via chat GPT we're going to hire on Upwork or onlinejobs Ph. You can hire off whatever site you want. Upwork is generally a little bit more expensive in terms of the talent you get. Online jobs is more about those three four, five dollar an hour bas. Okay. My preference is onlinejobs Ph. You're gonna put a Google form in the description which they're gonna have to fill in to be be applicable for the role. Then you're going to find the top 10. You're going to send them all a one minute typing test, you're going to interview the top three. You're going to offer a three month probation to one of them. You're going to tell the other two that there may be positions for them in the future on potential hires. Then you're going to give them a probationary contact contract via chat gbt. You can get a lawyer, do whatever you want with that as well. It's just how I roll. And then we're going to set up a job board in notion which you guys have already done in systems. So that should be a cinch. So let's walk through this process now. So first step is we have our scorecard. You guys have this from the previous module on scorecards. So you just need to fill this in with all the details which you guys will know how to do from the scorecards module. Next up we have a job description. Okay, this is what you're going to post on upwork or online jobs, whatever you want. So what you're going to do is make sure we have this read through the entire description to be considered for the job because you'll just get a lot of people that glance over it and just apply without actually reading what's in it, yada yada, responsibilities, part time, what they need to have, must haves, etc. And then additionally please complete this form failure to do so or was result in exclusion of your application. Click on the link and then it will take them to this form. You need to have this form in here. Okay. This is going to filter out the good ones so you can add whatever you guys want in here. First name, last name, email. Are you ever 18 gender give a windows or Mac? Have you used an app called Telegram? That's how we communicate. On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate your English typing skills? 1 very little and 10 being very skills time zones. You can work seven days a week. Do you have a bank account? Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your application? Really important to do. So you've got step one, step two, step three, step four is finding the best ones. So if you use online jobs you'll probably get about 200 to 300 applications in 24 hours, which is a lot. So what you'll do is go to responses link to go Google Sheets, you'll click it and then you can filter out and find your top. Okay so from the answers I usually like the ones that apply fastest. So people that are on the platform ready to work because you're going to get tons, you can put other filtering questions in there, but that's completely up to you. Next step is find your top 10 from the list in the sheets and then you want to send them a one minute typing test. So here's the one minute typing test. At the end of the typing test they'll get a words per minute score and then they will send that back to you. You just need to put that in email so you can BCC and email and then you have all their typing tests and you have the application resume as well. Then you can make a decision on your top three. After you've got your top three, interview them, offer a three month probationary contract. You can do that while I chat GPT as well. So I have a non disclosure agreement here. Sample and then I have a sample contract as well. Then after that they're going to be in your company and we need to give them a jobs board. So we're going to set up their notion board and it'll be one of these boards or something similar. Okay. So you can make a copy of one of these sales, marketing, admin operations or you can give them one of these roles completely. And it's up to you how you structure this. But the key here is with the va, they want to have evergreen tasks that they're repeating every week in their business. They're building skills and then you want to give them ad hoc tasks on top of this. Okay, so anything like random that you give them, you'll give them that. But repeated tasks that you can't automate is the key. The $5 an hour tasks are the best things you want to give Vas. All right, next up we have payments. So I would suggest using wiser PayPal. PayPal's a little bit more, bit more expensive. Wise is a little bit cheaper. Filipinos do like wise a little bit more because they get more money. Might not seem like much to you, but they get charged a fee on the other side as well. And then they have something called cash app I think in the Philippines. But how are you going to do that is fine. Next up tracking we have Hubstaff. So Hubstaffs $5 per seat or employee, they'll use that. I would suggest using this to track their efficiency in the role. Essentially what it's going to do is just take random screenshots when they're working with you and then it is going to give you a productivity percentage. So it'll give them a score per shift of like how much they're typing and moving the screen et CETERA so you know you can monitor their productivity over time. You can screenshot and see what they're doing which is really important in these roles. And then just a simple one is make sure they have Grammarly installed on Google Chrome so they're not making any mistakes while they're working for you. A couple of bonuses here guys is you need to treat them like a normal employee. So anything you wouldn't say or do to a western employee do not sound due to them. Very simple and straightforward but sometimes business owners can treat them differently. Won't go into detail on this but you can understand what I'm talking about here. Next, buy them gifts, flowers, praise them etc they really like that stuff as well. You can, we can as westerners get a little bit of a God complex to them so when we give them praise it means a big deal for them. I bought my long term va a computer like full computer set up like everything for Christmas one year. Blue blocking glasses because she was having trouble with her eyes. Paid for her kids tuition to school. Like all these types of things I've given as bonuses over the years just because she wasn't great employee and still is for the company. They really like job promotions and incentives. Very motivated by money. So if you can roll in some kind of like improvement in wage every three months, six months, reviews these types of things, they're quite motivated by that. They're very loyal as well. So you will, if you treat them well and you pay them, you know fairly they're going to be with you for a long time. Really important I feel for congruent and productive business that you find a good one. I've given you guys all the tools in this module to find a great one. One thing to notice is that they're usually generally always trying their hardest. A lot of the times it's easy for us to blow up at them or treat them unfairly. Their learning curve can be a little bit slower. So just take it easy especially when you're hiring someone. If your expectations are sky High for $5 an hour you need to check yourself. They're always trying their hardest and you'll know with the tools I've given you in here, especially with hub stuff if they're not trying their hardest and you can get rid of them, but just be fair, entitlement with long term employment can occur. We've seen this across multiple companies. Um, they become a little bit less responsive over time. Um, they become a little bit harder to deal with. They become entitled about their position. This can happen. It doesn't happen in all companies, but it's really important that you want to just be aware that this can happen. You want to regular meetings, you want to treat them like a normal employee, you want to involve them in the group chat, you want to send them praise and flat and make it like a consistent thing just to stop this from, from happening. And the second last point is VAs don't suck. Your training and management sucks. And I know sometimes that might be hard to hear, but it's really easy just to say like this VA sucks. When the reality is it could be your training or management that is the issue here. Not all the time, but sometimes this is the issue. So instead of pointing the finger and blaming, it's like, what's that Step brothers? You point the finger and you got three pointing back at you can be an issue with entrepreneurs or founders, especially with VAs as well. And last bonus point here is include them in your meetings so you can. I would include them with western employees if you have them in the same meeting. It's really good for team congruency and they like to be involved. Just note that they're a little bit shy most of the time. So they probably won't get on camera, they probably won't get on video, and they probably won't talk just because they're like very, very shy as a people. So they might text back or you might ask for their opinion on something. It might take a while because they just don't want to mess it up. Okay, that's, that's what I've found. So your assignment for this module, guys, is to rva so you can get them from anywhere. I would suggest online jobs or upwork. It's completely up to you. Online jobs is 99amonth and you can just do one month and cancel. So 99 to find a VA is pretty, pretty good. Then you'll have like 100, 200, 300 names or email addresses as well of people that would like to work for you. So finding one forever is not going to be an issue for you after that. So it's incredible to try upwork as well. I, you know, I've told you guys what I prefer, so good luck. Let me know if you have any questions. Happy to help.