Your New Business Model
There are several things you should learn from this:
- As you move forward, plan your business around someone else doing the work.
- Realize that the only way I was able to move this forward was because the implementer was working full-time for me and ONLY for me. I could never have done this relying on ten different contract workers along the way.
- Plan on not doing the work in your business, but on still being involved. You need to be the CEO of your business. Give direction. Give training. Give feedback and instruction. Guide the people you hire towards success.
- Don’t get frustrated when something doesn’t go exactly as you planned the first time. Sometimes it will take numerous revisions to get it right. Just remember: YOU’RE NOT THE ONE DOING THE WORK!
- The more you teach someone, the more they become capable of building and running businesses for you. The guy who built the business I just told you about has since built three more like it.
- The more you train your people in the Philippines, the easier life becomes.
PHILIPPINES IS NUMBER ONE
Now for the exciting part! Let’s start talking about the Philippines. Please, DO NOT go anywhere else in the world for your outsourcing. You may be thinking, “I’ve got a great contact in Viet Nam [or somewhere else], so I’ll go there.” NO! Go to the Philippines.
There’s a specific set of cultural differences that exists in the Philippines that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. Trust me—you won’t find this in Brazil or anywhere else in South America; not in South Africa; not in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Cambodia, nor Singapore—go to the Philippines with this! The Philippines will provide you with a completely different experience, and I will tell you why.
Skills!! They all do research for me and provide all the data that I need to make informed decisions in my business, what things we should or should not be doing, and so forth. They do all the research. Also, they write the content for the websites, do all the marketing; they write articles, create videos, do link-building and profile links, social bookmarking, social networking, directory submissions; they put up RSS feeds and link to them, and so forth. They do all these things that you always hear about, but that you never have the time to do on your own.
This leads to my first tip.
In the Philippines they do not have the educated workforce that we have in the U.S., so it’s difficult to find someone with experience in managing the kinds of projects that you want them to work on, meaning Internet-based projects. This simply means that you have to train the people you hire.
For example, they don’t know how to go out and market your website for you—you have to train them. But the good thing is that they all speak very good English. In fact, I have a girl working for me who makes phone calls to U.S. customers, and if you were to receive a call from her, you wouldn’t know that she isn’t from the U.S. You may detect a slight accent, but her English is perfect and she is super helpful and polite. That’s just another example of the many different things you can have done for you in the Philippines.
Take Care of Them and They’ll Take Care of You
The second reason I want you to see these photos is because over the years, as I’ve taught about outsourcing, I sometimes get the idea that people think that their outsourced employees are some kind of robots. You know—they’re 7,000 miles away and if things aren’t perfect you can “just get another one” or “just throw them away.” But they are human beings with needs, feelings, and desires similar to yours and mine. They have families and problems just like we do, so please treat them well.
You will grow to love the people that you hire, and they will become your friends—you’ll love working with them. As you treat them well, they will work very hard for you and do amazing things for your business.
When something goes wrong, give them a chance to correct it. Help them correct it. Seek out why something went wrong. Ask them questions.
Too many times I’ve seen someone hire an amazingly talented Filipino worker, only to have them not show up to work 3 weeks later and then the entrepreneur fires them, assuming they’re lazy or that they don’t really want the job.
Rather than fire them, try asking them questions. “What’s wrong?” “What’s going on with your family?” “Are you feeling ok?” “I noticed you didn’t show up to work yesterday—what can I do to help you?”
You’ll find that if you give them second chances, they’ll be much more committed to your business and to helping you succeed.
Cultural Features that Benefit Your Business
As I tell you about some of the important cultural differences that exist in the Philippines (as compared to other outsourcing countries), you will understand why Filipinos will do such good things for you. These are things I have learned from five years experience working with them.
Realize that some of these cultural differences exist in other places in the world. However, nowhere else will you find them all. It’s the combination of all these cultural attributes that makes the Philippines so different when it comes to outsourcing.
CUTURAL DIFFERENCES
Filipinos are Honest
First, the Filipino culture is a culture of honesty, even to the point that my employees have access to my credit cards, bank account, usernames and passwords for my personal e-mail account, my PayPal accounts, my hosting accounts, and root access to my servers. The only thing they don’t have access to is the ability to pay themselves, because if they had that, they would know each others’ salaries.
Never once have I heard of a problem with dishonesty or theft. Of course, having said that, please don’t go and do something that you’re not comfortable with and risk becoming the first one to get ripped off. I expect that all the Filipinos you hire are indeed fully honest, and this factor is so important because you can confidently assign them to do so many different things, which in turn will help make your life easier and your business successful.
This is always one of the biggest concerns people have when hiring overseas workers. If it’s a concern of yours, my advice is to give it a shot and see for yourself. I’ve never once seen someone get ripped off when outsourcing to the Philippines.
Filipinos are Loyal
Second, in the Philippines there is a culture of loyalty, almost to a fault. They are so loyal that once you give them a job, they will never quit, which means that you can give them all kinds of things to do. This allows you to teach them things in steps, if necessary, knowing they’ll stay with you. I have found that this makes my training much less complicated—you can make mistakes and still know that your Filipino is not going to quit on you.
Over time, because they’re so loyal, you can teach them things you wouldn’t normally teach an American worker or a contract worker. Knowing that they’ll continue to work for you will take a huge burden off you and allow you to be more effective at running your business (being the CEO!).
Filipinos Think Like We Do
Also, Filipinos think like we do. Their brains work the same way the Western world does, and they will read between the lines. So, if you make a mistake in something you’re teaching them, they will read between the lines and go figure it out.
I’ll share an experience that highlights this: I once gave an employee the task of setting up an account in one of my systems for another person. Keep in mind that their work hours are during my night hours, and when I got up the next morning there was an e-mail from this employee, saying, “Sir, I don’t have his e-mail address. What is his e-mail address?” Well, before I had a chance to reply to him, he had gone to work on it.
Thus, there was a second message from him saying, “Sir, is this his e-mail address? I went out and did some research to see if I could find it, and this is the e-mail address I found for him online. Is it correct?” So, even before I had the chance to reply and send him the information, he had already gone online and found it. He was trying to solve the problem for me.
As you train them and work with them, you’ll find that they’ll try to solve problems for you too. This is very different than traditional outsourcing!
They are Intelligent
Filipinos are very intelligent. They have bachelor’s degrees—real university bachelor’s degrees.
They Have Their Own Computers and Internet Access
Filipino employees have computers and Internet access, which means that you don’t have to go there and set up an office; they can just work from home. Also, because they work from home, you don’t have to go through a service to hire them.
They Work Hard and They Speak our Language
Employees in the Philippines are very hard-working by nature—it’s part of their culture. In addition, they speak American English (unlike in India), which is so important when you’re running a business in the U.S.
English is so prevalent in the Philippines that the government has actually mandated that business dealings be conducted in English. You can find people in the Philippines whose English is PERFECT.
Why? Because:
- Elementary school is taught in English
- Street signs are in English
- Billboard advertisements are in English
- They watch primarily American movies and TV (yeah, if you ever visit the Philippines, don’t be surprised when you walk into a bar and “Desperate Housewives” is on TV!)
- English is EVERYWHERE in the Philippines.
You can easily find people who write and speak perfect English.
They Like Us!
You can combine all the foregoing points with the fact that Filipinos actually like America, which is quite different from most other areas of the world. This will truly benefit you and your business.
The Best Website To Find VA’s—OnlineJobs.ph
HOW TO WORK WITH YOUR FILIPINO
It’s now time to show you how to proceed, once you hire your employee. I have 22 “Hiring Tips” that will help you train and work well with your Filipino employees. Here are the first two:
1. Daily E-mail Message
This is my number one tip. I require all my employees to send me an e-mail message every day. I have them answer three things:
1) What did you do today?
2) What problems did you run into?
3) What can I do to help you?
First, this daily e-mail message holds my employees accountable to me. If they don’t work on a particular day, they will have a difficult time telling me what they did. And even if they weren’t able to accomplish a lot or finish anything on a certain day, I still want the daily e-mail, which leads to the second thing they’re supposed to address, which is “What problems did you run into?” If they’ve run into a problem, I want to know about it, so that I can help them.
2. Difficult First Task—Solves the #1 Problem in Working with Filipinos
This helps solve or prevent problems, especially one special challenge that sometimes occurs with Filipinos. Here’s what was happening with me: As I was hiring people, I found that some of them simply “disappeared.” They would do really great work for a week or two, but then I’d never hear from them again. This was frustrating because I was hiring and training them and getting good work from them, but they would suddenly disappear. So I began giving my new employees a difficult first task, in order to weed out the ones who couldn’t handle the work—I wanted to know who was going to stick with it.
So here is the difficult first task I usually give them: I buy a domain and I send them access to the domain and to my hosting account, and I tell them, “For your first task, I want you to set up this domain on my hosting account; I want you to set up WordPress on the domain; I want you to change the theme; and I want you to write a post and a page.” Those are all hard things to do, and if they can do it all, then I learn a lot about them. For example, I know that they know how to Google; that they can figure things out; that they understand html and WordPress, FTP, uploading and hosting, Mysql, and how well they can write. Also, the “difficult first task” allows me to set expectations for them.
Again, this is the Number One problem in working with Filipinos.
I didn’t know this at first, but I have learned that Filipinos often feel embarrassed about things. They are humble people and can sometimes feel like they’re not good enough or that the work they’re doing is not going to be adequate, and that consequently they will lose their job. They’re afraid they won’t qualify. They’re also very non-confrontational. This is what led to some of them disappearing after I had given them an assignment they couldn’t do. They sometimes simply disappear because they don’t know how to do something, or they don’t understand something, or they fear they’re not going to do it the right way. You can prevent this with proper training. Remember, they look up to you and they don’t want to disappoint you, so instead of saying “yes” to what you’ve asked them to do, they sometimes say nothing, because they don’t want to upset you, and that’s when they disappear.
Filipinos would rather disappear and lose their job, than confront you with a problem they have. So, when you find someone not communicating with you, you NEED to seek out their problem and help them solve it. DON’T JUST FIRE THEM! They really want the job. If they’re not working, it’s because they need some direction or instructions.
So when I give them their difficult first task, I say, “I’m giving you a difficult first task. I know that it’s difficult and that you may not know how to do it. I know that it may scare you and make you feel that you’re not going to be good enough and that I won’t like you and will then fire you. So here’s what I want you to do: First, I want you to try. See if you can figure it out. Google it; find a tutorial; talk to your friends and see what they know and ask if they can help you. But when you get stuck on something and you feel that you’re just not making progress, I want you to ask me for help. I know you’re going to get stuck at some point, and I’m expecting you to come to me for help. I usually know how to solve the problem and how to help you, and if I don’t know how, I can find somebody who does. So again, when you get stuck on something, I need you to come to me and ask for help. I expect this to be a long-term working relationship, and I want this to work out. I’m here to help you.“
I have found that as you correctly set these expectations, it does a great deal to prevent losing somebody who can actually be a good employee for you. A while back my brother texted me about this very issue. He has three people working for him. One day he sent me a text message and said, “John, my guy disappeared. What do I do?” So I explained to him that he probably became embarrassed because he ran into a problem he couldn’t solve. I told him, “E-mail him and see if you can find out what his problem is.” About a week later my brother called me and said, “John, you were right. He was embarrassed because he got stuck on a problem and didn’t know what to do. Before this, he was doing such good work for me, and then suddenly I wasn’t hearing from him. So I figured out what the problem was, spent about five minutes solving it for him, and now he’s back to doing great work for me!” The difficult first task lets me set the right expectations with them to prevent them from disappearing.
3. Low Starting Wage
I have a low starting wage, but I raise it quickly, if things are working out.
4. Raise the Wage Quickly
Remember the guidelines I gave previously regarding monthly salaries.
5. Give Bonuses for Good Work
Let me tell you about one of my employees. A while back I gave him the task of doing article-marketing for me. I wanted him to write articles and submit them, in order to get content out there and to get links to our website. I gave him some pretty specific instructions, which is what you should always do. I taught him how to write the articles, how to submit them, which websites to use, how often to do it, why we were doing this, and some other specifics. Then I let him go to work. I don’t know exactly what happened next, because although I was getting the daily e-mails from him, he wasn’t talking about article-marketing, and I suspected that it was because he was a little embarrassed about what he’d done. So after some time, I sent him an e-mail message and asked, “Hey, what’s going on with article-marketing? Are you still doing it? I know it can be super effective, and our website is going very well right now, but you haven’t said anything about it.”
Here is his reply: “Yes Sir, I’m still doing article-marketing, but after I had done it a couple times in the way you told me, I then did some research and I figured out that if I do this and that, instead of what you said, and that if I do it with such-and-such frequency, instead of what you told me to do, and that if I use these websites, in addition to what you told me to use, it is way more effective. I hope that’s OK with you, Sir.”
What do you say to that? If my boss had given me some very specific instructions, there’s no chance I would go above and beyond and try to do things more effectively for him, but this is what he did. I’ve since come to realize that this is a normal experience with Filipinos—you’ll see this kind of thing all all the time with your employees; they will go above and beyond, because they want to keep their jobs. So that month I sent him an extra $50 dollars and he was thrilled. So, give them bonuses for doing good work.
6. Network
Once you’ve hired one person and you’re ready to hire a second employee, ask your first employee who they know that you can hire. To find another employee for you will take them about three weeks. I don’t know why it takes them that long, but I’ve seen it quite a few times. I suspect it’s because they want to make sure that this second person is really good, because they feel that their reputation is on the line.
7. Let Them Figure Things Out
I’ve already said that you need to teach and train your employees, but there comes a point when you want them to start figuring things out on their own. This may take some time for you to get used to it, but once you have trained them and they are doing more and more for you, they’ll be able to start figuring things out and you can begin to step away more from certain parts of your business.
BUT YOU CAN’T DO THIS IN THE BEGINNING! If you do, you’ll scare them away and they’ll disappear. In the beginning, you MUST train the people you hire.
8. Use Jing!
Jing is a complete game-changer for me. I use it to show my employees what I want them to do. It is free screen-capturing/screen-recording software, made by Camtasia.
To install it, go to http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/
Jing sits open on your desktop, and you just click on it, drag the lines out, click “Capture,” and Jing captures the image and you can then annotate it by adding text, such as “I like this,” “‘Move this here,” and so forth.
This is how I run my business; it’s how I give feedback to people. I create arrows, highlighting, and so forth, to show my employees exactly what I want. When it’s ready, I click “Upload” and then Jing uploads it to a server and puts the URL into my clipboard, then all I have to do is click “Paste” to put it into an e-mail message. The image is right there, online, immediately available, with no uploading and no FTP, and it’s all done.
Additionally—you can use Jing to make a video; it captures my screen and records my voice. You simply click on “Capture a video” and use the arrow to point at things while you’re talking. I usually say something like, “Hey, I really like what you’ve done here, but I’d like to have this ‘Employer Skill Search’ on the right side. And, this ‘Advanced Search’ is kind of messed up, as you can see here . . . there’s a problem here, so please fix that,” and so forth.
Then, when I’m done talking, I click on “Stop,” then “Upload” and Jing uploads the video I just made to a server and puts the URL in my clipboard, and now all I have to do is click “Paste” and it’s done—it’s online immediately; there’s no rendering, no uploading, no URLs, no files; nothing—it just works. And, you can review the video to be sure it’s what you want.
9. Record MP3s
In addition to using e-mail and Jing, I also record MP3s for my employees, and I do instant-messaging, and I use a project-management system I almost never talk to them on the phone. They don’t want to talk to you live, because they feel a lack of confidence, although they shouldn’t. They understand you fine because they watch American TV and movies and they listen to American radio, but some of them don’t think you’ll understand them. So at least at the start, I suggest that you stick with e-mail and instant messaging.
10. Give Them Access
Give your employees access to your software, your membership sites; anything you can. Keep in mind that you have to stay involved with your employees, but still, the more access to these kinds of things that you can give them, the easier your life becomes.
When I first started doing this, I was worried about this issue and I didn’t want to give them access to my site. Then the next day I wanted them to do another task and again I had to set up a special access to my website. I give regular access to each employee, and I never worry about it, nor have I ever had any problems. I can’t guarantee that you will never have a problem, but I can say that these people are very trustworthy, and the more you can give them access to, the easier your life becomes. I’m not in this to give myself more things to do; I’m in it to make my life easier.
11. Give Them Your Software and E-books
This is something else that will make their job easier and more effective, and will simplify things for you. Be careful when giving them a course you’ve bought. All training courses are designed for the CEO of the business to implement. They make assumptions that YOU’LL be the one doing the work. If you just give this to a Filipino worker, they’ll get stuck on some decision they don’t know how to make, because they’re not the business owner.
If you’re going to give them training from courses you buy, you need to filter the information in the course for them. Tell them what’s important and what’s not.
Now that you have someone else to do the implementation for you, you’ll actually find the time to read and use all the information products you buy!
12. Give Them a Job
I’ve seen people try to give their potential employees a task before they actually hire them, in order to evaluate how good they are. But it usually backfires. Filipinos are afraid they may not get paid for the work they do, so when you recruit somebody that looks good to you, don’t just say, “Hey, please do such-and-such a task so I can evaluate you to see if I want to hire you.” Instead, give them a job. Say to them, “I like you. You seem to fit well with what I need. You have a job—you’re hired. I expect you to work for me 40 hours per week. I will pay you this much, and the first month will be a trial or probationary period, and after a month we’ll talk about how it’s working.”
13. Use Xoom.com to Pay, and Pay Monthly
I use xoom.com to pay my employees. With xoom, you are wiring money (like Western Union), but it’s less expensive, faster, and easier. In my experience, it is the best way to pay people. Having said that, you still need to have alternate ways to pay people, because once in a while xoom will give you the message, “You can no longer pay such-and-such a person.” I don’t know why they do that, but no matter what system you have for paying people, you’ve got to know a couple of other ways to do it. I recommend you consider PayPal, eMoneyGram.com, or RemitHome.com (but be aware that PayPal is slow and a little difficult for Filipinos, so they don’t like it as much. Xoom.com is your best option.
Also, I pay my people monthly. I tell them, “You have to send me an invoice every month, on the same day of the month, or I may forget to pay you.”
As I’ve said a number of times, I’m not in this to give myself more things to do and I don’t want to have to remember these kinds of things. I’ve only had one time when an employee didn’t send me the invoice, so he didn’t get paid on time. Of course, when he finally did send it, I paid him.
In spite of this, when you first get started, you’ll probably need to pay people weekly because sometimes they’re concerned that they won’t get paid for the work they do. So here’s what I suggest you tell them: “I will pay you every week for the first two months, and once we’ve established some trust, I will pay you monthly. This way you know you will not be ripped off.” Also, you should never pre-pay for services, under any circumstances. If someone asks for money upfront, they are probably going to be dishonest; for the most part, Filipinos just don’t do that kind of thing, so anyone who tries to may be dishonest, and you should find somebody else to hire.
14. The 13TH Month
If you live in the Philippines and hire Filipinos who come to your office to work for you, the law requires that after one year of employment, they receive a bonus of one month’s pay. This is known as “the thirteenth month.” Here’s how it works: It is paid in December, so if you hire someone in January, for example, then in December you pay them December’s regular salary, plus a bonus of one month’s extra pay.