539: When To Hire Help And Where To Find The Best Talent With Toni Herrbach

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now, in this episode, Tony and I are going to answer one of our most commonly asked questions. How do you know when to hire and where can you find help for both your e-commerce and content-based businesses? Now, even though I’ve never really wanted to run a team, hiring help is just one of those inevitable tasks for any business. Enjoy.

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But before I begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon right now at 38 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away.

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Now on to the show.

01:04
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job Podcast. In this episode, we’re gonna answer a question that we commonly get asked. When is the right time to hire and where can we find the right people to hire depending on the job description? I think this is one of our top questions that other than how do I get started? This might be one of our top questions that we get in our coaching calls. You know what’s funny is I often get this question in the very beginning. People are like, hey, I don’t know how to do marketing.

01:32
So where can I hire someone to do all of my marketing for me? And in my opinion, that’s like the worst time to hire. Yes. In fact, actually, that brings up a good point is that we often see people say, like before they even have the business started, where can I find someone to run my Facebook ads? You know, or where can I find someone to do my email or where can I find someone to do SEO? And it’s like you haven’t even created a WordPress login. So like, let’s let’s calm down real quick. Yeah. And in fact,

02:02
Everyone always puts the cart before the horse. They’re worried about having too many customers and how to handle the customer support load ahead of time. And they ask, how do I handle, how do I hire a customer support person? They don’t have any sales or even a product. Or a customer. Or a customer, exactly. So I thought this would be an interesting topic today because you pride yourself in never hiring anybody. So.

02:30
That’s not true. I have people. do. But like you waited a really, really long time before you made your first hire. And I’m curious. Let’s just hear why. How how long you went, why you decided to hire somebody and then where you did it. I think for Bumblebee Linens, it was two years and I can’t remember our exact revenue, but it was somewhere in the the low six figures, a couple hundred thousand and

02:59
It was mainly because I was tired of sewing. Those fingers were getting, getting calloused. Cause most people know the story already. I would work a full day job as an engineer and then I would come home, have dinner, and then I would sew for a couple hours at night and then go to bed. Yeah. And I did this for a year. What were you, were you embroidering? I was embroidering. Yes.

03:25
The technical term, yes, I was embroidering, not sewing. I just can picture you like making wedding dresses in the back room. So was your first hire then someone to embroider? It was. OK. Actually, it was just someone to actually just help out with packing. But he ended up doing all the embroidery because I just hated doing it. It was it was a guy, actually. Yeah. We found this person because it was it was random. It was the son of

03:54
one of our housekeepers or babysitters. He came on and I was really paranoid because he was going to be operating this embroider machine that I think at the time cost us like $7,000. It’s fragile. It’s not like you hit a button and there’s a lot of intricacies to it. That was my Maybe never want to embroider anything, that whole story.

04:21
Well, no, it’s actually not that bad. You know, it is semi-automated the way we did it, but there’s just maintaining the machine. It’s kind of like this new printer I got, right? It’s great. Profit margins are great. Maintaining that thing is a nightmare. OK, so did this guy come to your house or at that point did you want to it? Oh my gosh. So he’s sewing in your living room? He came to… He’s like, can you change the channel? I don’t like this show. And this is why it had to be from someone we trusted. Right. Right. Because he was coming into our house.

04:51
And what’s hilarious, so it was a Hispanic guy. What’s hilarious is this guy would just come to our house at 8 a.m. and then one day we weren’t around. So what we did is we left the back door open and he went through our backyard and then one of our neighbors reported him. my gosh. OK, so that makes sense. So for my e-commerce journey, my first hire.

05:19
I mean, as everyone knows, my kids helped a lot with the packing and putting things together. But my first real hire where I paid real money and not in Chick-fil-A milkshakes was customer service. And that is because we were just having this conversation before we started recording. Customer service can be very much a mental drag when people are either unhappy or have questions that you feel could be answered if you just read the email, things like that. And I found myself

05:47
just really angry every time I logged into the customer service email. And I found not only was it taking up time, it was affecting me emotionally because once I would get through the emails for the day, I would just be in a terrible mood. And I thought, I need to hire this out because it’s literally ruining my quality of life because these people, know, a lot of it was really simple, like, oh, here’s your tracking number or, you know, resending an email.

06:15
But then you would get these people and you know, this one lady, like it was from Amazon too. And clearly the truck had run over the package. There were tire marks on the envelope because she sent a photo. And you know, she was like, this is ruined. It’s your fault. And I’m thinking, how is this my fault? Like when it left me, it looked good. But then she went on to tell me that she had ordered it for her sister who had cancer and I must hate all people with cancer.

06:43
because I shipped this to her or something like that, like this gross accusation. And I was so angry. And it’s really hard not to like come back at people when you’re so misrepresented. Like, what do you mean I don’t care about people with cancer? Like my dad had cancer. Like anyway, I was, at that point I was like, I have to be out of this. I have to remove myself and give this to somebody who doesn’t take, it’s not their business so they’re not taking everything personally. And so that was my first hire was to hire someone for customer service.

07:13
I actually hired one of my kids as a paid job, one of my adult children. And once again, this is something that you can hire out. I happen to use a kid, but you could hire this easily remotely because they don’t have to go anywhere to answer emails. I have a story regarding that also. We actually just hired our first dedicated customer support person last year and we had employees lying or, you know, working at our warehouse and I was very hesitant to hire a dedicated one because

07:41
I mean, quite frankly, we don’t get like an enormous amount of calls. And the emails aren’t that big of a deal. So we were just having our existing employees do it. But then we found that like productivity was way down because if you’re in the middle of packing and fulfilling an order and then the phone rings, you gotta get up, you gotta answer the call. Sometimes we get a lot of old ladies, sometimes they just wanna chat for 20, 30 minutes with you. And then that…

08:08
put a huge drain on our order for fulfillment, especially over the holidays. And so having this dedicated person was amazing. It even made Jen ecstatic too, because she never had to answer a phone call ever again either. Yeah. So in e-commerce, I feel like if you’re in the e-commerce world, the first hire is very apparent. Like it’s not a big question about like what you need help with. Maybe I think about one of my clients who sells the curriculum, her first hire was someone to ship.

08:38
This lady came to her house every day and shipped orders because she got to the point where my client was spending so much time shipping orders, she couldn’t write more curriculum because her time was being taken up by this job that could be paid at a much lower wage than the actual creation of the product. So I feel like in e-commerce, it’s pretty easy to identify when there’s a need. In the content business, I feel like it’s a lot harder to figure out

09:07
when you need to hire somebody. You’re to have to talk about this one because I didn’t hire my first writer until I want to say just before the pandemic or 2018 maybe 2019. Yeah, it was a lot. was you had been going a long time before you made your first hire, I think. Yes. And yeah. And to a certain extent, I think I need I need this person now. But before I was doing video, I technically didn’t even need the person that I hired.

09:37
Yeah, so I think it was Dana John Zeimus who gave a talk at seller summit several years ago where she talked about and I think it’s that square where you put all your tasks in and you put that you prioritize them and you put your Like how much you enjoy them, right? So there’s a box like low priority hate High priority hate low priority love high priority love right and you put all the tasks that you have to do on a daily basis in this box

10:05
Which is it’s she didn’t think it up like it’s it’s a common thing. But I think, you know, if you are at the point where you feel like you’re overwhelmed and you can’t get things done throughout the day, I would I would take that box and create it and list all the things that you need to do on a regular basis and then fill them in the bucket. Like is this something that only can be done by you? And how do you feel about it? Love it or hate it. Right. And start plugging in that box, because I think that’s one of the easiest ways to determine.

10:33
what you should start with outsourcing. I mean, that’s easy to say in theory. I think my biggest issue with content was, let’s say I hire a writer and I pay, I don’t know, two or $300 an article. It was hard for me to quantify the value of that article. Yeah. Because it’s hit or miss. And when money is involved and I still have free time, I’m like, oh, you know, why don’t I just keep doing this myself? And that was a hurdle that was just really hard for me to get over.

11:03
Yeah. So I think I made my first hire in like 2010 or 2011. And to have some context, this was back when in the blogging space, you needed to put out multiple articles a week. It wasn’t the one article a week cadence that a lot of people are used to today. So if you think back to, I can’t believe that was like 15 years ago, but 10 or 15 years ago, the…

11:33
what was required of you was a lot more as far as creating the content. So I hired writers first and I also wanted to start pursuing some other things so I wanted to take the writing off my plate. I actually hired from within my readership. So I wrote a blog post and said I’m looking for writers because I knew that my readers would write what my readers wanted because they were my demographic. And I’m obviously in the

12:02
DIY recipe You know home X sort of space so it made sense it wasn’t technical articles or you know I wasn’t in the banking space where I needed to make sure someone had the right credentials to write an article for me Okay, so how did you justify the expense? Well, I I didn’t pay very much and Not very much $25 an article Okay, and were you making that money back?

12:32
Oh yeah, yeah. How did you quantify it? Because I knew what I had to do to keep my ad revenue up and to keep the sponsorships coming in. So I knew that I needed three to four articles a week. So if I could get half of those off my plate, if I could get eight articles a month for $200, it was well worth it because I was making $6,000 $7,000 in ad revenue. So I guess your articles were a lot cheaper than mine.

13:01
What if let’s say it was like 200 an article? I probably still would have done it. I probably wouldn’t have done eight articles a month. OK, because that would have been very expensive. But for me, it just made sense because I was starting to get burned out on writing and I was also sort of struggling sometimes with ideas. So having the writers in here’s the other thing.

13:24
My blog was so popular that even just getting a byline on my blog, if these were bloggers that were like up and coming, it grew their blog by being a writer for my blog. So the pay was probably lower than average at the time. But there were several of my writers who went on to actually become more successful than me. And they launched by writing for me. So it was a weird arrangement, but it worked. I see. I think for me, the way I finally justified it,

13:54
Because the same way, it would take me like four to six hours to write a post. And then today for a YouTube script, it takes me about 90 minutes to two hours. And sometimes I just sit down and I’m like, what am I gonna talk about? And I would even spend like 30 minutes even figuring that out. So the way I justified it is once the money started rolling in, I said, hey, I just took a section of that and I said, okay.

14:23
this is my automation fund. And then I can spend as much as I want out of this fund to fund the content so I can move on with my life and do other things while still making a profit. That’s how I justified it. So what ended up happening is I stopped correlating the exact work to exact dollars, because you don’t know. One piece of content could take off or they could all flop. You don’t know. But you still have to be in the game in order to get that viral.

14:52
piece of content out there. So I think you bring up a really good point and I would say in the content space, I would not hire anything out until you are making money. So until you are generating some sort of revenue, I would not hire anybody to do anything unless it is an absolute time suck that’s preventing you from creating the content. the thought that’s coming to my mind with that is video editing.

15:21
because I do feel like that can be, you can spend five and six hours on a video edit and there are people overseas that will do it very inexpensively, especially if you get them trained and that could be keeping you from creating the content you need to make the money. So a specific student comes to mind as you just said would that be? And we never really went through in depth about a situation. So,

15:47
He creates really good videos, amazing videos, and he spends a lot of time editing. The editing is great. And we’ve been trying to push him towards, you know, hiring someone. But right now his channel is not generating revenue. Right. So would you advise that in this that he hire someone and what would be like the monetary limits and given his situation, like he’s spending hours and hours staying up till all hours in the morning editing. So I would say I mean, I can’t keep that schedule anymore.

16:16
I’m too old. So for me, it becomes a no-brainer to invest in that. I would say for something like that, it’s worth spending the money on an editor overseas, not a US editor, but an overseas editor, because let’s just say, and I don’t know how much time he specifically spends a week, but let’s just say someone is spending 20 hours a week editing content, video content. What happens if you had 20 more hours to film?

16:44
video content, how fast would your channel grow? I feel like from our experiment that we did last month with the 30 videos in 30 days and everyone saw growth on their, every single person saw growth on their channel and increased views, increased subscribers. If you could invest 20 hours a month into creating, writing the scripts and creating more videos or writing the blog posts, editing, know, whatever it is, right? If there’s something where it’s such a stark contrast, then I would say,

17:14
I would hire. So I agree with you here for a somewhat different reason. I think for me, when I think of video editing, it just mentally brings me down. Like I don’t look forward to it. And I know if I film another video, I’m making my life worse because I’m going to dread the editing part. So it’s a spread effect of not only ruining your day, it’s also could be preventing you from making more content. From wanting to make more content. Yeah.

17:40
because I’m adding to my dread. Which then could prevent you from actually doing it because we all know that if someone doesn’t like doing something, it’s really hard to get them to do it. Right. Whereas now it’s so easy. I can just pick up the camera, film something, throw it overboard and know that something good is going to come out of it. So I guess it just depends on whether you enjoy video editing. It’s something that I enjoyed early on when I was learning how to edit. But once I knew how to do it, it just became a chore.

18:09
Okay, so you bring up with this, that’s like point number three. Your segues are phenomenal today. I didn’t realize you had bullet points. Are we done with this? Okay, all right. Well, you just said something that I think is very important. We alluded to this earlier. You enjoyed video editing in the beginning. So what that means is you know how to edit videos. Same thing with SEO, Facebook ads, content. Before you hire out, you need to know

18:38
at least a basics of how to do something or how you want it done. Because I feel like the biggest point of failure for people when they hire and they’re unsatisfied is because they did not convey correctly to the people they hired how they want things done or what their expectation is of success. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of.

19:06
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19:33
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:40
I mean, I’m going add to that, not even knowing what to expect or what you want, it’s always going to lead to failure. This is why you just can’t hire out marketing for your store. Yeah. And I always take this to an extreme. Like I know what I’m hiring out extremely well so that any little piece of BS I can call it right on the spot or any excuse. But I think what I do takes a little bit too far. You don’t really need to be proficient at what you’re hiring out.

20:10
You don’t need to be proficient, but you need to have a basic understanding and expectations. So I don’t know much about Facebook ads. So, but if I was going to hire a company to do Facebook ads, I would talk to you, I would talk to Andrea, I would talk to a couple other of my friends and just say, hey, what should I expect? What do you think the costs might be? Give me some baseline information. I would probably listen to several podcasts about Facebook ads so that when I go into the conversation with

20:39
the company that I’m hiring or the person that I’m hiring, I can smell BS, right, when they’re just trying to make things look amazing. Because I’ve seen proposals from companies, no one specific, where it’s like all smoke and mirrors, right? They’re listing off all these things that they’re gonna do for you. And I’m like, they’re not really doing that. And if you don’t even have that baseline knowledge, how can you tell if they’re trying to pull one over on you or not? And since we’re on the subject of marketing,

21:08
can’t really hire it out until you’ve made a sale. Or you have some sort of understanding what your target customer is. Most people go into e-commerce at least thinking they can just throw money at every problem and have it magically work. Even SEO actually. I guess you could, but not even doing some basic keyword research on what you’re selling and understanding whether it’s even possible to rank.

21:36
can lead you to a lot of problems later on down the line as well. And then ads, same thing. mean, if you don’t know the angles of the messaging, I mean, the agency can help you with that, but they’re not gonna know the customer better than you are and you’re paying them. They’re a hired gun. They’re never gonna do as good of a job as you will. Yeah, you’re killing the segues, because that brings up another point.

22:01
You have to completely understand your demographic and your customer before you hire anybody in marketing because even as someone who is an email marketer, I need to know who you’re trying to target. I don’t know that just by looking at your account. I can get an idea. If you’ve already been sending emails, can get, can pull some data, but for the most part, anyone you hired doesn’t know anything about your customer and doesn’t understand all the nuances about your customer. So how can they ever be expected to provide

22:31
great quality service when you haven’t explained that to them in an effective way. Yeah. I mean, the same even goes with website design, actually. on when people want to set up their Shopify store, they’re like, OK, can you recommend a designer? And then I always recommend Carson because he’s awesome. Yeah. But Carson’s expensive because he digs deep and he tries to help you figure out the messaging and stuff. if you’re just hiring someone on Fiverr or Upwork,

22:59
They’re just gonna put together a little pretty website, which is soulless, and you actually have to add the copy, and you have to understand how to even pick the colors, the copy, the messaging, the imagery, to target the type of customer that’s gonna buy your stuff. Yeah, so I think when you’re thinking about, when you get to that point, you’re like, okay, I’m generating some revenue or my life is so miserable that I have to outsource something. You need to have a very clear understanding of what you want.

23:28
what your customer is and what you have your expectations for whoever you hire. Yep. And certain certain jobs are harder than others, right? Like customer service. Pretty simple, right? Like this is our policy. We refund people because of this. We don’t because, know, like you have to empower your people to by giving them the correct information. So certain jobs like a writer like, I need three articles a month. They need to be this long. This is the tone. Read five articles on my site already. Some things are a lot easier.

23:58
I think writing is hard actually. think it’s hard to find the right person, but I don’t think it’s hard for the person hiring to explain it. Like to be able to put together a content guide. To me, that’s much easier if you’ve already been writing for your site than to say, I want a website design and you really don’t have any idea what you want. And what people also don’t realize, especially with web design, but with a lot of different things, is that like you get the product, right? And you’re like,

24:26
Oh, but I wanted a carousel on my homepage. Well, another $500. Thank you very much. Every time you don’t get exactly what you want, it’s going to cost you more money, which I think is fair because these people are providing the service. And when you want to change something, you don’t know how much time and effort goes into changing it. It could be several hours from the design team or whoever else. kind of just reminds me of my little bathroom remodel. We thought of a bunch of things after the fact and they were

24:55
Very expensive. Yeah. Oh, I didn’t want a heated floor. Whoops. So I think I think we’ve covered sort of the when you know how to hire and what to expect. But I think the next step is where do you hire people from? Because this is the other place where people get very stuck. I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this. You are. But just for the types of workers that we’ve hired, at least on the e-commerce side, I found that

25:25
Employees in the Philippines just have like a different attitude compared to the employees that we’ve hired in the US They’re more Eager to please you they’re more willing to just go above and beyond the call of duty so I mean I hate to say it but I Always look over there first now When I’m hiring if the person doesn’t need to be physically present for almost for most disciplines actually yeah, so I will say if you

25:53
need someone virtually and they don’t have to work next to you, I would start overseas. Yeah. Doesn’t mean you’re going to end up there, but I would start there for sure. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, but so our customer service persons over there, my right hand person who edits all my podcast videos, everything is in the Philippines. And I can’t I mean, I don’t want to bust on some of my former employees here in the US.

26:24
But let’s just say that the drive is hard to find, harder to find here for the type of workers that I’ve hired in the past here in the United States. Yes. And so I will say there is a, there is an art to hiring overseas. There are cultural differences. There can be some language barriers, even if they are fluent in English. They don’t always get our idiomatic expressions and things like that. So

26:51
I think if you are thinking about hiring overseas, you need to go in with a very open mind about the amount of training you’re going to need to provide and the amount of, I don’t want to say hand holding because that’s not quite right, but just the initial onboarding process is going to be maybe a little bit longer. You know, it’s funny that you say that. I have the opposite feeling. Really?

27:20
because the only problem that I’ve ever had with workers over there is them being afraid to ask me more specific questions. Yes, that’s a big one. But if I put together like a bunch of Loom videos that explain things, they’re pretty good at putting filling in the blanks. Like if I glossed over something. Well, that’s what that’s what I’m talking about, though. Like the video training, the more training you provide, the much better off.

27:47
things are going to turn out for you. you have to do that with employees here too, right? I’m not as good as for doing that in person. To be honest. Well, what if it’s a virtual employee here? A virtual employee here in the US? It’s the same process, right? Yes, I feel like I’ve done more video training with people overseas and I do more like just printed, you know, XYZ with people in the States. Okay, so I do the same procedure with people that

28:16
Bumblebee Linen’s for example. I have actually a WordPress site, a dedicated WordPress site where I film videos. So I just film the series on how to maintain the printer. Or I just went in and film. It’s a 72 part series. It might end up that way when I’m done with it. But just all the procedures and everything, the embroidery, all that stuff is actually in there. Yeah. So it’s the same thing. But yeah, you’re right. When they’re live and you show them.

28:45
Sometimes you gloss over the details. Like for example, I was trying to teach my wife how to do a few things that I just implemented recently at Bumblebee with the printer. And I made the video and I said, go watch the video. She’s like, I don’t want to watch the video, you show me. then I showed her, but I missed some of the little details that I put in the video because I was very careful in the video. And sure enough, she made the mistake that I forgot to tell her about.

29:13
You’re gonna have to edit that out of the podcast so she’s not mad at you. I’m just kidding. It’s my fault ultimately, right? Yeah. So but I do think the training is really important and I feel like everybody that we know that is hired anywhere here or overseas and has been unhappy. It’s usually their own fault. Now, sometimes you just get a dud like our first Filipino VA that we had eight years ago was great for like the first.

29:41
six to nine months. And then there was a period of time where there was a lull in the amount of work that I had for her and she found another job, which is very common. If they feel like they don’t have job security or if they feel like there’s a chance that you might be letting them go because the workload is diminishing, they will find a second job and then you become back burner. And so over time, her work deteriorated because she was working somewhere else. And we ended up.

30:07
You know parting ways and what I realized is I didn’t need someone full-time. needed someone 20 hours a week So then I shared the next VA with somebody else But so I think that you know making sure that if you tell somebody like my graphic designer I Pay her for the hours. She’s contracted no matter what I don’t do this. Well, you can have between 10 and 20 hours It’s like no you’re getting this many hours a week if I don’t give you that many hours of work I pay you anyway, and I think that’s really important especially overseas because if they feel like they don’t have job security

30:37
they will find something else. That’s interesting because I always have this conversation up front. I always say, hey, know, just want to let you know, even if the work gets low, I plan on keeping you regardless because I need you. And I expect that if you plan on leaving, you would give me, you know, X number of weeks or months notice. I’ve actually had that conversation. Not right away, obviously, but after a year, if things are working out.

31:07
Well, and I think what happens, what can happen too is it’s really hard to hire somebody. so sometimes it’s like when your kids are little and you ask them to unload the dishwasher and they do a terrible job. So you just do it yourself because it’s like, it’s so much easier if I just do it myself instead of trying to train them how to do it correctly overall, though, then you end up with an 18 year old who doesn’t unload the dishwasher. So it never works out in the end. The same thing with hiring. It’s hard in the beginning to train somebody.

31:33
It’s hard to say I need you to do it and I need you to do it exactly this way. This is the standard. I think what can happen is you get frustrated and you’re like, I’ll just do it myself. And that’s actually what happened with Kevin, our video friend, right? He hired a couple of people off Fiverr. He ended up redoing their work and was like, this isn’t worth it. And I get it because when you are hiring somebody because you’re strapped for time, training them does not help you and you’re strapped for time. It just takes up more time. So initially it will suck more time from you than it will bring you time. However,

32:02
down the road, it will give you your time back. It took me about three to six months for the video editing part. Yeah. So I guess as long as you set the proper expectations that way. I mean, if you and maybe this is because I worked at full time as an engineering director, it would take like a full year to bring a new hire up to speed. Now, granted, video editing is not as complicated as electrical engineering, I hope not. But it it set the proper expectations for me.

32:31
Yes, bringing anyone on board. But let’s just think about the mentality of someone who is in a starting up phase and they get to the point where they hire somebody. All you want to do is get stuff off your plate. So the thought of having to teach people to redo and redo is painful, but the pain is worth it in the end. It is. And the way I always do it is I just start recording everything that I do. Yes. Like I’ll just leave Camtasia on my desktop.

33:01
and edit a decent tutorial video about exactly what I do. I’ll narrate it. Like this is what I did when I was bringing up my podcast editor. I literally just brought up a podcast. It was like an hour long video and I showed all the little stupid things that I do. Yes, I had to watch that too. Well, no, you didn’t get, you got the, just show it to me. I don’t want to watch it. No, I didn’t. I literally have the video sitting in Dropbox. really? Yes, I do.

33:30
I had to watch that same freaking video. So it’s funny you said you have a WordPress site. I actually have a YouTube channel where I film a private YouTube channel where I film because I’m too cheap to pay for like pro loom. Which is probably dumb, but I just put the videos on YouTube. That’s how I do it too actually. Yeah. I just put the videos on YouTube, but then I link them on. Yes. Yeah. So I create playlists and things like that.

33:59
in the YouTube channel. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don’t do that. I mean, I organize the videos in WordPress, but they all live on on the YouTube channel. YouTube. Yeah, as as unlisted. So just to make sure we answer all the questions because we will get this question. Where do you hire if you want to go to the Philippines? You and I have both used online jobs dot P.H. Yes, which I would say is probably the best site for hiring. If you are going to do this.

34:29
Onlinejobs.ph has a, I don’t know if it’s like a tutorial or a knowledge base, I’m not sure what they call it, but they have a whole tutorial on the process for hiring. And if you’ve never hired overseas before, it is worth taking the 30 to 45 minutes and going through their tutorial because they walk you through a lot of the nuances of hiring overseas and the expectations of people overseas that we don’t always have here in the US. And usually people get tripped up in the hiring process.

34:57
And so definitely take some time to watch those. I think they’re videos and they might be templates, too, but definitely take some time to go through that. Yeah. And then early on, actually, our first Filipino hire was not through online jobs. We were nervous about the whole process, as you guys listening probably are. We used a service in the e-commerce space called Second Office. And basically what they do is they kind of pre-vet and pre-train the VAs to be familiar with e-commerce.

35:26
specifically Amazon, Shopify, you know, that sort of thing. And they also provide an office for them to go to. I think brownouts are a problem in the Philippines. Sometimes they lose power, although it hasn’t really happened that much with with my VAs. providing an office where they’re going into, where they can actually verify that they’ve entered the office and show up for work is actually quite helpful. Of course, that service comes at a cost. But if you want to do everything above board and

35:56
not have to really interview us thoroughly, then a service really helps. The nice thing about a service is that you can give them all your parameters. when we hired our graphic designer from onlinejobs.ph, it took, we actually had our current VA at the time go through the whole process to get the graphic designer until we were down to like the last two or three. And so a service, if you don’t have a current VA, a service will actually help you find the best person for the job.

36:24
That’s the other thing you need to make sure you really know what you need to hire for because you can’t hire someone Overseas to almost optimize your amazon listings and then six months down the road go. Oh, can you start editing videos for me? uh now granted my Like executive va that I ended up getting from online jobs.ph or no that I got from intelligentsia, which was second office Uh by the time she was finished working for us. She knew how to do everything

36:51
but we had had her for eight years, kind of the same thing with your VA. Over time, you just train them to do more and more things. We gave her courses and put her through courses. We made a lot of training videos. And so it doesn’t mean that people can’t learn things, but you can’t take anybody, and this is really anywhere, and hire them for customer service and then go, oh, but by the way, can you write blog articles for me? Probably not. They can’t do that. I’ve tried, actually, with a certain amount of success.

37:21
You just have to keep your expectations in order. Yes. So be real clear about what you need when you go through the hiring process. Now, what if people are like, listen, I’m not ready to hire overseas. That’s too intimidating. I want to hire someone in the U.S. I always take the friends and family route, but I don’t think you do. I don’t because I can’t. mean, one of my kids are. friends or family.

37:47
My kids aren’t old enough. mean, you planned ahead for many, years to the workforce that you was a good planner. So for us, we use Indeed, which has worked out for us. We did use a temp agency once to find a few people, but it just ends up being so expensive that way. I mean, we’re talking like 3, 4X. Oh, wow. What a

38:15
what a Filipino worker would be. And probably 2X what a typical US employee would be. So here’s a little hack. If you don’t have any friends or family like Steve. You told me to go to church. That’s not the hack I’m going to give people. So one thing that I do think works, depending on what you’re hiring for, is hiring someone out of their current job.

38:45
So this happens to my daughter-in-law all the time. So she was a manager at Chick-fil-A and she was very young. She was in her early twenties and she got offered so many jobs because people were so impressed with the Chick-fil-A that she worked at and the quality of the service at that Chick-fil-A was so good and they she was such a great worker at that Chick-fil-A that she got offered at least two or three jobs while she worked at that Chick-fil-A and I find that like if you have a great server at a restaurant

39:15
because I think a lot of jobs you really need the personality, you can train the skills. So if you need a customer service person and you think you can match the pay of wherever you are and you see, like you go to Joanne’s Fabrics, right? And you’re getting checked out. And this person is just like head and shoulders above everybody else in the store. I would have no problem saying, know, here’s my phone number. I have an e-commerce business. I’m looking for someone to embroider. I think you would be, and answer phones. I think you would be perfect. Give me a call. Like,

39:43
Probably harder to do if you’re a dude, but to Yeah, that sounds creepy. Hey, I sell linens. Why don’t you come on over and You want a hanky? You want a hanky? But I think hiring away from jobs, this happened to my son a few times too when he was working at a restaurant. He was working at a high-end restaurant. A lot of people go in there and say, hey, I need someone to run a job site or I want to need someone to do this. And if they see that you have the right personality, you can always train on skill.

40:12
A lot of times personality and work ethic is far more important than actually knowing how to embroider or knowing how to package a package, right? Like that’s not a highly skilled job. See, I don’t know if I agree with you. We’ve had we hire on personality over at Bumblebee Linens primarily, but we’ve had some duds over the years where we just love the person. Yeah. But they just can’t do the work. And it’s not complicated, but they.

40:38
I feel like you’re not great at hiring in person because you’ve had some really You’re correct. Although I will say that the people we have, we’ve had for seven years now, right? So, But let’s talk about Liz. Actually, Liz is a perfect example. Our friend, Saunders. So I met Liz Saunders at a blogging event and she was the event coordinator at this event and we hit it off, became friends. Well, when we started Seller Summit, we needed an event coordinator and the first person that came to mind was Liz.

41:06
Now she had some event experience, but nothing like what we were doing. And so we hired Liz because I had made that connection with her earlier. And I think when you are doing something and you meet someone that’s super qualified or you’re like, Hey, keep that person in your back pocket. Like keep that phone number, maintain that relationship. And that’s not why I maintain a relationship with Liz. We’re obviously friends, but she ended up being our event coordinator for the first four or five years of seller summit, which then she ended up transferring over to jungle scout, right? Ended up.

41:36
Starting as I think she started as like Greg’s a second executive assistant I’m probably butchering this but she ended up working her way up jungle scout to a very high role and now left to start her own company So like I think when you make those connections with people You know always be thinking like hey, I met this person three years ago they might be a really good person for this job and I think that’s the best way to hire people because you have a

42:02
better understanding of who they are as a person and their work ethic. We knew Liz had a great work ethic when we hired her. That’s true. So you’re suggesting that I go, hey, you and I, we’ve known each other for three years now. Did you know that I sell linens? I can dry your tears. Okay, I think this is devolved. But yeah, so I think if we were to sum it all up.

42:31
Don’t hire something out unless you have some amount of proficiency in what you’re hiring out. And at least my advice is, I get in trouble for saying this all the time, I like to look to the Philippines first now. Me too. Unless it’s in person and then I use Indeed. If you’re looking for the Philippines, onlinejobs.ph.

42:54
If it’s for e-commerce, Intelligencia, I always say second office because I can’t spell Intelligencia. I can’t either. And when I had to write them checks, I had to look it up every month. I was like, how do I spell that again? Yeah. But just don’t hire too early. Just slug it out. Wait till you’re generating some amount of revenue first. Unless what you’re doing is so painful and takes so much time that it’s actually preventing you from doing something else.

43:25
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you’re looking to hire overseas, then I’ll post the links to the resources on the podcast episode page. For more information about this episode, go to mywipequitterjob.com slash episode 539. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywipequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.