Picking up where I left off — John Bresee from backcountry.com told me to go to the Philippines with my outsourcing.
This was a new idea…at least to me.
He referred me to a hiring agency in the Philippines. They promised to match me with a Filipino VA who met all of my requirements.
And they did.
To protect his privacy (and mine…I never tell the names of my VAs, people always try to hire them when I do), we’ll call my first Filipino VA Jake. Jake was perfect. Hiring him was the most liberating experience of my life.
He worked 8 hours per day and worked ONLY for me!
I had tons of ideas and processes I wanted to implement in my business and I did NOT have enough hours in the day to do them. But Jake did! It blew my mind that his full-time job was to do anything I asked him and taught him to do.
Jake was incredibly intelligent and intuitive too. He followed directions and read between the lines. If I left out a step in my instructions, he would use his problem solving and deductive logic skills and figure it out. It was amazing.
The Revelation
I was paying the Filipino hiring agency $750 a month to employ Jake full-time. It was more affordable than local alternatives, and he earned every penny. But through a turn of events, I learned something that really ticked me off.
Come to find out, the agency was siphoning $500 of what I thought I was paying Jake every month. My VA was only getting $250 of my intended compensation! I flipped a brick. I had no idea that would be the arrangement when I hired Jake.
Neither did he.
When we realized what was happening, we were both upset. We both felt taken advantage of. (Later on, I learned that it’s pretty standard for an agency to take a huge cut of their workers’ pay. I understand that it’s just business. To me, it’s bad business and I will never do it again.)
The day after we recognized the discrepancy, I got an email from Jake. “Sir, I quit. I walked into the agency off, quit, and walked out.”
I didn’t know what to do except celebrate. I directly offered him a full-time job, increased his salary considerably (and he got to keep all of it), and we got back to work.
Was I Finally Getting Outsourcing Right??
Remember my article-marketing nightmare from a couple emails ago? Jake forever freed me of it.
I taught him the whole process – how to structure and write articles, create headings, resource boxes, links, seo, and where to submit the articles when he was done. He did EVERYTHING!
It was all automated (by him) — which was the entire reason I’d started my online business in the first place! I was in heaven.
Eventually, I hired someone else from the Philippines to add to our team. He was a programmer and he did great work. But I still hoarded the bulk of the programming to do myself. I didn’t trust that he could do as good a job as me.
The story doesn’t end here. Even though I thought I was outsourcing the right way, I still hadn’t uncovered the true potential of these Filipino VAs.
They soon had the chance to prove themselves, even though it came as a total fluke. A total fluke that involved me almost losing my wife and our unborn baby girl.
In my next email, you’ll learn about the scariest and most challenging trial of my adult life — and how my VAs helped me through it.
John