Speaker 1: 0:38

Welcome to the 30-Minute Empire. My name is Matthew Garris and I'm the owner of thebusinessbuilderscom, and we build and sell profitable e-commerce brands to people that are looking to get started and transition away from the 9 to 5 into the entrepreneurial world in a safe and guaranteed manner. Now, if you're new to this podcast, I want to say firstly, welcome. I'm going to make sure that this is worth every precious minute of your time, because we're going to be going through and talking about all the secrets behind people that are living a very, very different life to everyone else. They're working 30 minutes a day, but they're running brands that basically run without them, only requiring 30 minutes a day of their time, while actually producing a full-time income. So in this episode, we're going to be talking specifically about how to find virtual assistants based in the Philippines to replace your operations, take stuff off your plate and actually get stuff done. So let's jump straight into the meat and potatoes, ladies and gentlemen. So, first thing, where do we find these people? Now, a lot of the time, we go to very popular platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, and the reason why I don't recommend those places is because those people come with a different mindset to employees. Employees is the people that we want inside of our business, right? People that want a stable income, people that want to do the same thing and are happy and satisfied to do so. People on Fiverr and Upwork, which are basically a marketplace for talent. Those type of people are freelancers. Now, freelancers have a very different mentality to entrepreneurs and employees. Freelancers want to do multiple small projects, work from home. They still want to exchange their time for money, which is fine, but they want to exchange their time for money, which is fine, but they want to run multiple projects. If you hire a freelancer to do full time work for you and I've made this mistake before we had an ad agency and we had a full time guy based in India and he was running you know five different customers and clients, and then, on top of that, he was working for us full time. So we're paying him to for him to like basically manage the ads of all of his clients.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Now, the reason why we want to go for people based in the based as with an employee style mindset is because those type of people are not going to be running different projects during their working hours. They want to work nine to five, log off after that. They're not people that are just gonna be obsessed about the business after hours, like entrepreneurs are, and they're not gonna be working during working hours like a freelance would, okay. So we wanna find employees. Now where do we find them? Most people say, oh, matthew, just go to Seek. No, I do not recommend going on Seek for multiple reasons. The reason why I highly highly recommend finding virtual assistants in the Philippines is because of the fact that it is quite affordable to do so. So the average virtual assistant is happy to get paid around 500 USD a month. Okay, so that amount makes it very affordable for entry level entrepreneurs to be able to get talent into their team.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Now, this ranges from, you know, web designers to to, basically, customer service representatives, order managers, stock managers or people that can just kind of do everything. Now, what I recommend is a platform called onlinejobsph, and when you go on there, when you have a job, what you want to do is you. When you go to post that job, you want to think about what are the main objective of this role. Now, I recently posted a job to find someone that would be able to take inquiries and give them a call and book meetings inside my calendar, so they're called an appointment setter. Now, the biggest thing that I needed for them to do is to have a nice phone voice, so I didn't want them to have a voice like mine, which is all crackly, and we wanted to find someone that had a very clear voice and, number two, most importantly, and you'll be surprised by this but don't have a noisy background.

Speaker 1: 4:53

So what I did? Instead of posting a big job application, I said we're looking for an appointment center. Please send me a voice memo saying the following Hi, welcome to the business builders. I know that you inquired about one of our businesses. I wanted to see whether you were free tomorrow to speak to Matthew, the owner, so I posted this job with this task. Okay, and the reason why I do this is because if you were in a band and I learned this from one of my early mentors if you were in a band and I learned this from one of my early mentors if you were in a band, would you ask them to send a resume for the head singer role, or would you tell them sing me a song? Obviously, you would say sing me a song. So that's the same principle we take to job interviews.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Instead of interviewing every single person that posts as a job application, what you want to do is you want to send them the task, which is send me a voice memo. So I had like 50 people apply. Out of the 50, 30 people didn't even read the actual comment saying please send me a voice memo, so I immediately wrote them off for a lack of attention to detail. The next thing that I did was I looked through and I found people that had a noisy background and I got rid of those people because I don't want to sit there and tell them, have to explain to them that their background needs to be not so noisy. Right, I had other people that sent the link but the link didn't work, so immediately I'm writing them off for a lack of attention to detail or double checking stuff. The next thing was I narrowed it down to people that I felt would represent our brand really well and had a very good phone voice. Now this allowed me to narrow it down to about five people. I interviewed those people and I found the first person that I got along with and then we proceeded with them. That aligned with, obviously, our budget for the role and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So this is a very, very simple way to hire virtual assistants based in the Philippines for 500 to 800 USD per month, and that allows me to efficiently grow my business and allows me to basically focus on other things. So let's get to the more exciting part. Let's say you've got your operations, you've got customer support, you've got advertising, and those are the main things that are dragging you down in terms of your time. So what you want to do from here is you want to hire two people one for customer support, one for advertising management okay, and then the main thing is that you want to give them a piece of your mind. So if you wanted to show them, if you wanted them to communicate exactly the way you wanted them to communicate, you're going to need to teach them. The way you teach them is through something called SOPS standard operating procedures. Now, it's a document that is concise, it's short, it's got templates, it's got scripts, and it allows you to basically show them exactly what you want them to say, how to say it, and so this requires you to get what's in your brain out onto a piece of paper, so that they can then take whatever is on that piece of paper and then convey it to the task.

Speaker 1: 7:49

Now, if you don't have standard operating procedures, you're going to be sitting there frustrated because this person's not actually doing what you want them to do. And I made this mistake when we hired our first person for one of our e-commerce brands. It was customer support and this person was saying the wrong things. They were like writing the wrong sentences. They didn't have a nice footer, it was just a mess. And I was frustrated and I was saying fix this, fix, that fix. And I remember thinking like, should I just get rid of this person? It's cost more time to basically manage this person than it is to actually complete the task.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Now, this is the lesson. I didn't have any standard operating procedures. So once I added, I said you know, I'm going to stop. I'm going to build out a document that shows them exactly what I want their footer to look like and how to create it, exactly what to say and what I want the branding to look like, exactly how to respond to refunds, returns and all of these different things. I'm choking because it's such a good topic, but all the different things that I wanted them to say, how to say it and all of a sudden radio silence, nothing. They knew exactly what to do. I didn't have to ask them any questions, they didn't have to bother me and it was perfect. I literally saved three hours a day on all of those tasks. So that is my recommendation.

Speaker 1: 9:07

Step one we go to onlinejobsph and post a job, but it's more like a band kind of suss out right. We want to get them to complete the task inside of the job description, the voice memo, the admin task, whatever, it is Okay. Once you've got an applications, filter out all the ones that didn't meet the criteria, interview five that did, and then from there, once you've hired them, build out standard operating procedures, which basically takes what's in your mind onto a piece of paper for them, so that they can be a little replica of you. I hope that's been helpful. Welcome to the Business Builders. I'll see you in the next episode.