spk_0:   0:01
Hi. Welcome to building a business that lasts. My name is Joo in, and I'm your host on a quest towards stories, tips and ideas that will help you grow a business without being stressed out, worn out and ready to quit. Each week, I'll interview other business owners who has successfully grown businesses of all types for many years. It's my hope that these conversations will help you build a business that lasts when you mention the word outsourcing. It can have all different kinds of connotations for people. But the reality is it can have a powerful impact on your business. On today's episode, I talked to John Jonas and he's gonna talk about how you could literally buy time. I kid you, not this guy work 17 hours a week. We're running a full time business with a team of 20 plus virtual assistants, programmers, designers, Web masters writers, researchers that air all the way over in the Philippines. So he has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in business by doing outsourcing differently. If it's a topic you've ever had, any curiosity with how you can actually buy time and help give somebody else a job can help you grow while also staying in budget. You're gonna really love this conversation with John. Hey, real quick. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to let you know about a special offer on my brand new book, Building a Business that last just like the podcast title. It just came out and you can grab a free copy today. All you've got to do is cover the cost of shipping and handling. I can't wait to get this in your hands. Go online right now and grab your copy. Just go to get Jay's book dot com. That's get Jay's book dot com, and you can get your free copy sent right out to you. So go check it out. And without any further ado, here is today's episode. Hey, John, Thanks for being on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. So I'm really excited to hear your story because you are involved in an area of work that I think could help a lot of entrepreneurs out there. And I have a little bit of experience in this particular field myself, but I'm not gonna tell my story right now. I want to hear yours I'd love for you to kind of start off kind of talk a little bit about your journey. How you decided to start your own business is in the first place How you got where you are today and maybe kind of a few key highlights of you know what your business is like these days?

spk_1:   2:26
Sounds great. So when I was in college, I had a roommate and we were talking about what we wanted to do. And I was studying computer science, and he was going into medicine, and and I said, I want I want to run my own business. Actually, I said, I want to remember business because I want to be able to control how I work. He was like, Don't you know that small business owners works so much more than everybody else? And And I was like, What? I think I could do it differently. And, you know, really, I had no no idea, right? I mean, I was in college, I have no clue. But that was a motivating factor for me. So I graduate from college in 2003. I have a job for eight months. I only just my only goal during that time was to quit my job because I found out I'm a terrible, terrible employee, and the incentive structure of of working as an employee just doesn't work from me. It's great for a lot of people. It doesn't work for me and eight months and I quit my job. I had some side stuff going at some contract work that I was doing, and I had some online stuff that was sort of working, and I knew I had this contract stuff for two months. That was gonna be really good. And I just said I have two months to make this online stuff work and two months in and I had enough income t justify staying at home and working on it full time, which was awesome. Obviously, that was amazing. Fast forward. Probably another year, and you know, I'm drowning like I'm running my own business and it's all online, and but I'm still drowning, working 40 or 50 hours a week, and I knew there wasn't enough time in the day to get everything done, and I had tried to hire local people and it didn't work for me. I tried to four different times of four different people. And when they realized what I was doing that was running an online business, the first thing they did was quit to go do it on their own. And I'm kind of getting into where I am today. So I tried to hire someone off of India. I read the four hour work week and and he recommends the service and I tried it and it just did not work for me. It was really hard. I went toe e lance, which today is up work as they emerged with a desk and hired a contract worker. And I had him write a whole bunch of stuff for me and came back, and I had to check it all. And then I read. That was when I realized staying outsourcing sucks like this. I hired this guy. He wrote a whole bunch of stuff for me. I did check it. A couple things were plagiarized in it. Most of it was good, but then it all fell back onto me to get the rest of work done. And that was when I was like that. I don't know what to do. I was so frustrated. A couple months later, I had a guy give me a really good tip and this was so random, he says. When you really start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. And to me, that was like, What the heck? That's super weird to give me a specific location and and it kind of gave me hope that I might find something different and I went back and forth for a couple months. I didn't hire someone, and then I finally did. I took the leap. He gave me a reference where I could hire someone full time and obviously that that at the time was a big leap was the full time thing. And I hired this guy full time, and I was. It was through an agency. I was paying them $750 a month for his full time work. They were paying him 250 a month for full time work, and it was the single most liberating experience of my life where I had I someone who I could afford. First of all, who his full time job was, do anything I ask him to do, and I found that I could teach him to do stuff that I was currently doing and take entire systems off of my plate. And so, like the previous experience with with the lands where that person wrote the content and send it to me and I was up to me to deal with it, I was able to teach him to write the content and to deal with all of the process for publishing that content and making it effective for us. And that changed everything for me in my business and what I could do and what I thought I could do, what I could think about doing what was possible for me. And so, you know, that was the first guy I hired to have 24 people working for me. And you fast forward with that guy. I learned a little bit of I can get time back in my life by hiring the right people and that guy he So that guy, by the way, still works for me today, 14 years later. But he knew nothing at the time, like he he had no skills. I just taught him everything I could and figure out over time that, like Aiken by time, by getting the right people here. So for the last probably 10 years now, I've worked about 17 hours a week, mostly just managing what other people are doing for my business, and that's that's kind of where I am. That's

spk_0:   7:40
awesome. I have a whole list of things that I now want to delve into because I think this topic is really relevant. Thio the audience, especially young new business owners or even as people who just just starting a business for the first time. I've been in it for a few years because I think that so many people can relate to that idea. Hey, I started this business to make more money and have more freedom, like that's usually the case. They want to make more money or they wanna be their own balls run their own schedules. And the problem is, I think a lot of times people end up realizing that they don't really own a business. They really just on a job. Yes, and that job is often more work than their regular job would have been if they just stayed wherever they were, and there's a lot more risk and you don't have like, there's just so many things, you know, And, um but the first thing I want to address that I think this is Ah, I don't think it has the same negative condition that it used to. But I run a digital agency and done it for 20 years, and I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing people all over the world. And whatever that word, outsourcing comes up or offshoring or working with people like theirs. I think in general there still could be a little bit of a negative connotation of that in America, and I think it's gotten better. But I'm curious, like what your thoughts are on that how you address that objection with people or that fear or whatever that kind of underlying negativity might be. Or do you even hear it?

spk_1:   9:01
So I hear very little, and I have two thoughts on it. Number one, usually someone hiring someone in the Philippines like an entrepreneur hiring in the Philippines is not hiring someone in the U. S. Like they either can't afford it or it's not working for them. That's usually the case. It's not sending a job that otherwise would have been in the U. S. Overseas. That's right. Job didn't exist. That's one thing. Second is I've traveled the world. You know, I've learned that people are people like there's human beings all over this world and United States. Human beings aren't necessarily better than, uh, Costa Rican human beings or Brazilian eggs or French or Filipino human beings. Right? But the situation of the Philippines a lot is a lot harder than it is here. And so a soon as you work with someone in the Philippines and they thank you for giving them a job on a regular basis, you start to see you like Okay, this is this is more than just me getting some work done. This is helping change someone's life and changing their parents life and changing their kids lives. And I've watched it. I mean, I've had the same person working for 14 years now, and I've watched his family change from his parents, who he he lends money to on a regular basis because he makes so much more than his dad does to his kids, who are growing up with him, taking them to school and picking them up from school. Is that a nanny to his wife and her family? Like I've watched the whole thing changed for the better. So that man there so meant that so much good that goes on. And then I have watched the other side of it, which is entrepreneurs that, you know we have in the U. S. Is like a 95% failure rate of entrepreneurs. And we see a way, way, way higher success rate than that with people who hire someone. The Philippines. We see business six succeed. I don't have good data on it, but I would guess that like like 40 to 50%. So that's, you know, it's so much different. And that takes someone out of the workforce who's now running a successful business and eventually creating jobs locally. So anyway,

spk_0:   11:14
yeah, no, I love that. I think the whole idea of what you said is people are people. Is is exactly basically how I address it with other folks whenever I've had the question back in the day. When I first started in the agency, I had a few contacts that reached out to me. And I did some outsource work to India, and and it was a disaster to begin with, but eventually kind of found a groove. And now we have, you know, some teams of guys that work over there that are awesome, and they're just an extension of who we are. And I always say, like, Look, nobody has a problem, you know, giving money to other countries that need help. What if we're able to give jobs to people? I mean, it's no different than hiring somebody here that needs a job like you're hiring. Somebody needs a job. And to your point, it's It's usually in that case in the snares that you're describing. It's not replacing an American job. It's just replacing stress and anxiety and late nights and time away from family that an entrepreneur is probably just putting on their own back. Yeah, you know, the first time my family's better. Yeah, exactly. Exactly The first time I actually heard about you, um, in your business was I was speaking at an event with Dennis, you and, um and he was talking about how he uses some V A's through your service and really just spoke highly. Haven't talked a lot about it in one of the classes that we were that he was teaching. And and I think it really opened a lot of people's eyes up to this reality that there people all over the world who, especially if you have a repeatable, trainable task that you can teach them with, can have a powerful impact on your business. And I think one of things that, uh, a good differentiator to point out here, too, that you talked about kind of briefly going to highlight it is the idea of going out and hiring somebody on up work or 99 designs or any these other service is that provide, like freelance contract work. Those aren't inherently bad options. It just that you're hiring one person to do one specific thing, and you don't have a relationship with that person. They don't know you. They don't know what your expectations are. They don't know what your process is, Um, and what you're talking about and correct me if I'm wrong is actually literally hiring a full time team member who's working with you is a part of your team, not somebody just doing a single project, but you're actually, you know, at a fraction of what it would cost. Tiresome in American America, you're hiring somebody to actually be a part of your team.

spk_1:   13:22
Yeah, So here's Here's how I describe the difference. It takes the same amount of work to recruit someone full time as it does to go through the process on like, up work. Nine. Our designs to get a single thing done right and with a worker named designs or wherever it is, you're hiring 100% turnover in your business. It's guarantee. Yeah, whereas you spend that effort to hire ah, long time, full time virtual assistant or not, just virtual assistant programmer, designer, content writer, Facebook marketer. You know, a paperclip person, whatever. And that person's gonna pay off 100 times over, even if you have to put more work into it, which you d'oh. But then, you know, like I said, the first guy I ever started ever hired still works for me today, and and that's the case with most of my people, So it's a whole different. It's a different world that we're talking about then hiring up Ah freelancer or a project thing?

spk_0:   14:20
Yeah, absolutely. One thing I'd liketo hone in on because I think it relates regardless of whether we're hiring somebody here in United States or anywhere is the question of how to hire. And I think that sometimes one of the places that people kind of mess up when they're trying to hire somebody you know, like higher V A, for example, in the Philippines, they might think they can just go on a website, click a button, and also they have the right person, and it's probably not. I mean, it could be easy, but it's probably gonna be that easy, because hiring people you gotta have find the right person that's gonna fit in your mix and be able to train them in AC lament into your process. So what are some? Maybe some tips that people could look for when they do wanna consider this idea of hiring in the Philippines or anywhere else in the world where some of the tips that you usually tend to tell people toe to think about before hiring?

spk_1:   15:07
Okay, so my first, what I'm gonna say is contrary to what everybody else is gonna tell you. So every everybody is too busy to hire someone. Everybody's too busy to train someone, right? So I want you to go about your hiring process with with the opposite place in mind. You're gonna go into this hiring process knowing this is going to take time. This is going to take time to hire, and then it's going to take time to train, and it's going to be harder than if I just did it myself. Hey, And then what you're going to do is you're gonna go through the recruiting process, which I can talk about. You're gonna spend time on it. It's going to be painful. You're gonna hire this person, you're gonna spend time training them. It's gonna be painful. And when you're done with that, you have bought time. And now, So I'll give you an example of why why you're going to make this process painful now when you want something done or when you get an idea of something to do. So I had this. I had this idea of of this process that we want to do, and I had this great e book that I bought and I bought it and I usually what happens with you by digital content and it sits on your hard drive or you don't even download it because because you're the mental capacity isn't even there to know. If I read this, I have to implement, and that's gonna cause me guilt because I'm not implemented cause I don't have time and had the stupid email sitting in front of me. That's right. So I bought this e book and and I knew when I bought it. I'm gonna give this to this person in the Philippines because he works for me full time. He's gonna be able to implement this for me forever, right? So I buy it. I downloaded and I read it and I read it right then and I read it, taking notes specifically knowing I'm not going to implement this. And when I was done, I sent it to one of my guys in the Philippines and I said, Here's this book. I want you to read it. I want you to implement it, but I want you to pay specific attention of these chapters in these pages. I want you to ignore this chapter in these pages because they're not relevant to your business. Let me know what questions you have. Right. So I was able to take this thing that we needed to get done, and I spent 45 minutes on it. It was implemented for months and months. It made us so much money, and it cost me 45 minutes. And that's because going back to your original question, I went through the hard process in the beginning. So So you want to talk about the hard process that I'm talking about? Yeah, Absolutely. Okay, So what most people want is hate. Tell me someone good I can hire. And that doesn't exist. Because if I know someone good, I hire them myself. Trait. Right. You know, someone good. You're not loading them out to people, right? They're working for you full time in your business. So an agency that is hiring people for you, they don't know. They're they're just having on online jobs. They're hiring on my website. I know that because we cause because we battle this every day, they're just finding a random person and giving them to you, and and you don't have a choice. Now. I'm not saying that an agency isn't a good way to do it. I've done it before. It's an option for hiring. I'm just saying that usually we see probably, ah, 60 to 70% success rate when people recruit for themselves versus, like, a 40 to 50% success rate when we recruit four people. So everybody wants to come in and say, Hey, recruit someone for me or find someone for me to do this hard, work for me. That's fine. We can do it. We don't like to do it. We do it very little. And it's not a successful No. So you're gonna recruit for yourself. You're gonna go on. Do you want to talk about my website?

spk_0:   18:54
Yeah, you're welcome to

spk_1:   18:55
Yeah. So, uh, I own online jobs that pH When I started, it was out of necessity, because I I just wanted to be able to recruit for myself rather than going through an agency. And rather than having just one choice of one person to hire, I wanted, you know, to have hundreds. And so when I started it, that was my kind of my thought process. Maybe I could get a couple 100 people to sign up here and then I can I have some up options when I want to hear something we ended up having. I mean, today there's half a 1,000,000. There's half a 1,000,000 profiles in there, and so finding any sort of scale you want is super easy. So you're you're going online jobs that pH and you. Either you start looking at profiles. That's the first thing to do is look at profiles off people in whatever you want to get done and see like, Does this skill set exist? And depending on what you're hiring for, you might be really, really surprised at, like, Holy cow, not only to this skill set exists, but these people can do this thing and this other thing that I'm looking at and they're asking for $450 a month for full time work, right to do this thing, right? So look at a bunch of profiles and just gonna get an idea of what people are doing, What what skills exist, how much they, how much they want for it. If you want, start contacting people like send them an email and say, Hey, are you available for work? I have this job and I'd like you to do this. And that's how I generally prefer to start recruiting. Other people prefer to go on and post a job and let the people apply to their job. And so you'll get a bunch of applicants and then you. Then you go and start, start interviewing them, basically start their weeding out process. In either case, you you need to start with, like, 20 people. So if you've contacted people you need to contact like 20 people. If you've posted a job, you're gonna get more than 20 applicants. Probably. And you can Initially, we'd amount just by cursory reading them and start like reply to 20 people. The Philippines has an interesting thing where they're so the people are so loyal that if they already have a job, that and you just contacted them, then the chance of them not replying to you is reasonable. And so it's not a good idea. It's just narrow it down to one person. So that's the person I want to hire and contact them. They're probably not gonna reply to you. Well, not probably not. There's a chance they might not. So then here's where my recruiting process stands out, and this is This is kind of similar to Dennis. Is Dennis. I know Dennis you pretty well, so I didn't start interviewing them. I don't do a Skype interview. A Skype interview in the Philippines is guaranteed to lose you. Good candidates. I only do that Skype interview. If the person is going to be talking voice doing voice calls with customers, if they're not doing voice, I'm not doing it because they don't want to do it. They're scared. They're embarrassed. They don't have a microphone. They don't have a webcam. Whatever it is, there's a whole bunch of reasons why they might not want to do it. They'll schedule the interview with you and then it won't show up. So I do all my interviewing through email, and I will ask 2345 questions per email. And I'll do that lots and lots of times. And the reason is because so virtual work is different than working in an office. Like in an office. You see this person come into work every day, and you stand next to them in virtual work. You don't you're not gonna get on this on a Skype call with this person every day, and you don't get to see what they're doing every day. So you kind of just have to gauge based on how communication goes. So when I send lots of emails with lots of questions, I get to see all kinds of things that are very indicative of how the working relationship will actually be. So if I sent an email and I don't get a response for two days, then after I hired this person, chances are really high that when I can't contact them, they're not gonna respond for a couple days. And that doesn't work for me. In a virtual environment, it's reasonable to have someone have their friend help right there. Online job profile. It's not reasonable toe. Have your friend reply to 10 emails over four days, right? You get to see their English. You got to see how they deal with slang. You get to see the oddities in English or how fluid out. Perfectly fluent there, right, I also get to see by asking one or two or five questions I get to see their attention to detail. If they answer all of them, then chances are pretty good when I give them four tasks that they're going to do all four of them. If they ignore one of one question, then chances are pretty good that if I give him four tasks, they're gonna ignore one of them. And again, that doesn't work for me. So, Mrs Usually what I found is, if I go through this recruiting process, if I email people lots of times, lots of questions, people will naturally drop out and I will end up with one or two really, really good candidates. And I usually pick my gut. Um, I'll have a gut feeling towards one of them and and I'm you know, I'm probably 75% on my recruiting. Other people have other things I've seen other people like create a Google doc or ah, Google form where they'll say, Hey, go fill this out And that's how they'll like weed people out rather than just accepting applications through the platform. Another thing that I do that will is an instant leader is some people will do this like on the on their job post. They'll say, uh reply, make make your application make the last word of your application avocado right like that just to see. Did they read it right? Are they following directions? I will do some like that during the recruiting process, and I'll tell you why. I'll say attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to this to this evening to your response, and that one for me is a really good one. Where I get to see, like, how accustomed are they, too, to working with a foreign? Because Filipinos are very, very Westernized. So that question you'll get three responses from it. Number one, they'll ignore it, and that's not great. Number two, they'll attach a picture of a pink Cadillac. Great number three and the best response. And this doesn't happen very often. Although I keep talking about this. What's probably happening more often is they question it. So if a Filipino says you asked me to do this and that seems super weird, why do you want this? That's a really, really great response. Tells you they're willing to question you. They're willing to think they're willing. Thio. That's a great That's a good good sign. So, yeah, that's my recruiting process in a nutshell that I hope that helps make the process a little bit easier. It's still hard, you know. You still have to. Once you hire them, you still have to train them. You have to bring them on board. There's no way around that. So,

spk_0:   25:57
you know, I think that's really helpful. First of all, and second of all, I think that the transparent that you give it the beginning of saying, Hey, look, doing this right is actually gonna be really painful is helpful because I think that a lot of times there's so many people in service is and things out there, they're like, Oh, it's a quick fix. Sign up for this and it's going to solve all your problems And the real business is just not like that and you might be in that place now. You know, you said you work 17 hours a week and have a successful business. A lot of people are thinking, Gosh, well, that's just a dream world. But the reality is you have to put in a lot of pain and hard work and planning and, you know, to get to where you are right now. It's like you just magically appeared there one day and you signed up for a service, and all of a sudden you had 20 virtual assistance and and you just work half a week? Um, my guess is you probably put in a lot of hard work and pain along the way.

spk_1:   26:44
Yeah. I mean, you can You can try and do this the easy way, but it doesn't end up how you want it. It takes work. I mean, any anything worth worth doing takes work, right? Anything that's gonna give you good results. And this is to me this is how you live the four hour work week and I've been at the four hour work week. It's not enough. That's why I work 17 hours a week, because I just need something to do. Um,

spk_0:   27:08
I'm curious. I'm curious. Toe, pick your brain a little bit if you if an entrepreneur out there is running a business, and I had a lot of things going on there thinking, Gosh, this idea sounds really good, but I need to hire programmers. We talked about because I've talked a lot about some programmers and designers and all that kind of stuff and then use the word We used the word virtual assistants. A lot went Really clarify. What can a virtual system do? What are some of the good things that a busy business, personal busy entrepreneur might be able to successfully hand off? What are some good starting points of tasks or or things that are good ideas to try and transition to, Ah, full time overseas Team member.

spk_1:   27:44
Awesome. So let me let me give you the opposite of what's good? Let me tell you what was that? First, don't outsource your sales. Like I see people that are starting or whatever. And they're like, Oh, I just I want someone to create the sales process for me. Yeah, that's not gonna work. No, you're you're the CEO. You need to be the CEO. You need to understand your customers. You understand that the best you need to be the marketing sales person, everything else can be done. So you met on. I'll tell you now that I have 20 for people that work for me in the Philippines full time, I'll kind of go through what they what they do. And I'll tell you a little bit. About what other people have. People do. So we obviously have programmers. We have designers have Web master type people, HT male and CSS and Java script. Um, I have a system admin person. I have an HR person. I have content writers. I have social media people. So one of things you mentioned the beginning was if you could give really good, deep descriptions of repetitive task, that's a great thing to outsource. Well, so, like our Facebook, we I don't know. We have 200,000 likes on it, and I have never made a single post. And I didn't create the Facebook page, and I found it one day like music for our online jobs. I found a Facebook page for us. It was like, I have no idea what this is or where this come from. I sent an email to my team and said, Hey, did any of you guys create this? One of them responded, said, Yeah, I did. I just thought it would be good for our business. Have a presence on Facebook, so they do a lot of thinking tasks for me. We haven't do admin work. We have him do customer service Well they do personal tasks for me, like, Hey, I want some nine millimeter ammo. I don't know anything about it on really carries my credit card. Buy me, buy me some nine millimeter ammo. Don't spend more than 50 bucks, right? Or I need to renew my passport. I don't know what to do. Figure it out and tell me what to do. Stuff like that works like, just think for me a little bit so I could spend my time on more important tasks. We have some data entry did entries is a really good one. Lead generation, Like I can teach someone really easily. Here's this online process. Go to this website. Look at this person, get their phone number and or get their e mail and send him an email from my email address. That a little reply to me, you know, just as like, a lead generation or whatever it is, whatever your lead generation processes. So those are those are some really good things to begin with. For me, what I've seen is anything that could be done online can be done by a full time or part time virtual system some.

spk_0:   30:24
Yeah, I think That's really helpful, man. I think a lot of times out there, it's kind of figuring out which pieces can I hand off? And I think people are a lot of times if they would take the time to sit down and write out all the things that they do as a business owner, especially in the early years when they're either a solar preneurs or just have a couple of team members. People are often surprised at how many different jobs that they do and how many jobs that they do that are really simple tasks that are repeated over and over again. And that's the kind of stuff from, like, I've made that mistake plenty of times myself shoot. I didn't hand over my own internal bookkeeping till a couple of years ago, and I don't know why I like. I just I think I was too scared that someone's gonna mess it up was too arrogant to think that I could do a better job or I just I don't know just what certain things I had always done from the very beginning when I was a kid and so I don't want to hand them off But once I did, we actually ended up with better work because I could focus on the things that I'm actually talented and gifted at. And I could kind of focus on my street my true strengths and abilities and allow somebody else to have the opportunity to use theirs.

spk_1:   31:28
That's so true. So can I. Can I talk about the first thing that everybody should outsource because right now, all these ideas So I love them, make a list thing. The first thing that people should outsource is not something you don't know how to do. Yeah, first thing you outsource is something you are currently doing to me. This is all about time. Time is the only thing you can't buy, right? Except I can buy time by hiring someone to do something I am doing and teaching them to do it. And then I don't have to do that thing again, and I just got time back. So the first person you hire, you're gonna hire them to do a single task. That task. The whole goal with that task is to see if you can work with this person. So you're gonna teach them to do you're gonna teach them, which means you're gonna spend time with them. You're gonna teach him to do something that you are currently doing your business, something that's going to get something off of your plate. And if you can work with them, If you can successfully get this test done, that means you can successfully get another task done and another one, and it's gonna take time. It's gonna take years, but to get down to, you know, the four hour work week. So that's that's the first and second and third things you should outsource. Our thing is, you are currently doing things you know how to do, not things you don't know what

spk_0:   32:47
to do. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's certain tasks in there, too, that, like there's kind of three different buckets. At least one of them is stuff that I have to do myself. For example, there's nobody that I can outsource. You know this conversation in this podcast, too. But every other aspect of producing a podcast is outsource able in some way. I can either automate it through, you know, automatic tools, but there's some things that robots just can't do least not yet. And then there's all those middle things and those are all things that could be outsourced mint everything from, you know, following up to make sure I have your headshot for, you know, the podcast to creating social posts to, you know, sending out those special post sending a follow up. Thank you e mail. Sending a schedule like all those things, can all be a turnoff. Theo. Yeah, I got exactly editing audio,

spk_1:   33:34
uploading it to Facebook or YouTube or wherever it's going,

spk_0:   33:37
you know, creating a different version for Instagram. All those things could take if I were doing myself would take me Gosh would take me the whole week, you know? And And all I have to do now is show up for this 30 45 minute conversation, have a talk, and then I check a box that I finished my part and everything else is done by somebody else. And figuring those things out, I think gets really key advice that which he says, Don't try and outsource something initially that you don't know how to do find something you're already doing. Maybe when you're actually, you know, have a pretty good outlined for and do that first. That's that's really great advice. Yeah, so I like transition a little bit. Gosh, you're the kind of guy who definitely could talk to all day. And I think that these ideas air super helpful for people out there most I would guess that most small business owners have never ventured anything in into the outsourcing world, and it's a little bit scary. And and, like you said, it's not necessarily easy at first. That's what a lot of people probably have started. Maybe tried to outsource something and then that I tried. That didn't work. But I always make the same analogy of It's like people that tell me they tried Google ads and they don't work. Google ads do work. That's why they're worth a quadrillion dollars. You probably weren't doing it right. Or maybe that wasn't right fit for your business. Either way, it's the same thing with outsourcing like this because you tried something 10 years ago and you had a failed attempt. Doesn't mean that that whole, you know, industry

spk_1:   34:55
is busted. Yeah, and I could go through a whole bunch of cultural reasons. Why try this? If you've tried this before. Try this again in the Philippines and try it with a full time person and see what happens. There's there's all kinds of reasons why this will change. Number one. Why it'll work for you. Number two. How it will help you become the CEO of your business and not the Grant worker. That's that's a really big deal. That's how you start cutting your time back.

spk_0:   35:22
Yeah, absolutely huge. Actually. Have a few things I'm thinking about right now that I studied. Outsource. So I make a check out your webs that when we're done one thing that I love to talk about when every single show that's really important to me. I've got five kids, and life outside of work is important, even though I'm the recovering workaholic myself. Um, I love to ask the question about work, life balance, and obviously you already admitted to cutting your schedule way back as far as actual work hours. So you have kind of figured out, at least in some instances, how to have a lot more freedom. So it's a perfect alignment in this case, but left to kind of hear your general thoughts on like what his work life balance even mean to you. How do you think other people confined strategies toe help, alleviate, maybe being overworked and not being able to put focus in the right areas, whether that's family or friends or whatever else is in their life.

spk_1:   36:10
So I don't have a great answer for that because I live in a different world than most people where, you know I work 70 hours a week. It's noon, and I haven't worked today and and I have scheduled today with my with my two teenage kids, five kids, also with my two teenage kids, too. We were two hour bike ride and an hour and 1/2 of weight training for them. They're they're competing nationally and mountain biking, and I'm doing that with them. And then my three youngers I spent. I spent the morning with one of you know, So that's that's my work Life balance for me. Here's Here's Something. Here's something interesting that I I didn't realize I did until a couple of years ago, but I've been doing this for a long time. When I'm in front of my computer, there is nothing else but work. There's no YouTube. There's no Facebook. There's no distractions. There is no bright, shiny objects. I should. I shut everything out. I get my crap done and that's it. So when someone happened, have you seen that video? No, I haven't seen it because instead of that, I spend the time with my kids and my wife, and that's what that's what's most important to me is the time with my kids in my wife. So the the other end of that is howto how to get there for me. Work, life, balance. I have always made every decision in the business based on this fundamental like idea of who's going to do the work, who has to do the work for this thing. Is it me, or is that someone else? Because if it's me that takes time away, if it's someone else, I'm willing to put in the time initially to get the process going so that someone else could do the work, Um, in me, every business opportunity is evaluated that way. Every idea inside the business is evaluated that way. Who has to do the work is a mere to someone else, and that that allows me to probably have unfair. I don't want to call it balance. Even, you know, of working of work and family

spk_0:   38:17
and kids. Well, I think that perspective really important because I know at least for me, I'm I still struggle with warning and the idea of doing the work. But then saying that my family is the most important. There's a difference between like saying that they're my priority and them actually being the priority like, yeah, I actually stopped doing this thing and it's just a warning out there but is listening cause I speak because I still do this is is getting caught in the idea of like, Hey, well, once this project's over, then I'm going to do this. Once this thing's over, then I'm going to do this. And whether that's been, you know, take a weekend away with your wife or or, you know, take your kids to the park in the afternoon. I mean, whatever that may be, incredibly, don't have kids. They don't care about that. But I think that for those of us that do and I think a lot of business owners do because they're trying to create that freedom for their family, and they find themselves stuck in those worlds. But I think what you've done and I'm like, I got a lot of learned a lot to learn from you. John is just this idea that hey, I'm gonna put some things in place and I'm gonna ask that question of who has to do the work was I'm not sure I always ask that question that sometimes I'm so willing to be the one that does the work. And I think I think part of that is my own pride and ego of wanting to say that I did the work on them. And I need to be willing to let somebody else have the opportunity, because I think sometimes it's easy to steal somebody else's opportunity to do a job by trying to do it all yourself, and then you're neglecting the things that you say are most important. Like it's my own little personal counseling sidebar here.

spk_1:   39:46
Certainly possible. And I also think that, like there needs to be a baseline up success. Yeah, in order to do that like you have to have some you have to have income coming in, And, uh, I'm not gonna take this opportunity because that's too much work for me, right? That that's gonna take too much time away from my family. Some?

spk_0:   40:06
Yeah, I think that's absolutely You gotta have that baseline. Alright, let's wrap up with this last thing that I always like to ask is how you continue to personally grow, whether that's in your knowledge of business or things that you're interested in or whatever else is it. Books, Blog's mentors, Um, or do you feel like you're kind of at know the things that you need to know? Where do you grow personally and, um, and how do you kind of plan to keep the business that you have and build a business that lasts?

spk_1:   40:31
So a number of years ago, very wise friend of mine told me, There's so much information in blog's The World's information is in block posts. The world's wisdom isn't books, so I don't read anything on the Internet. I don't look at Facebook. I don't watch any news. So I try and improve myself one you know, through books to I'm a pretty religious spiritual person. So I spent a good amount of time in spiritual things, each day and find that is clarifying and is feeds my soul, which I think we often neglect. So I spent a lot of time in the scriptures and that that helps me improve. You know, like my pride, which is so terrible for me helped me be nicer to people, which is People ask, you know what the thing do you regret from younger that you wish you would have done differently. I wish I would have been nicer. Yeah. So those were, like the two things I get no information in my in my brain and I Mm. I read

spk_0:   41:44
books. I love that. I think the whole idea. I think I know who said it first, but remembers exhibitors that used to say something like, you know, garbage in garbage out. And it's, you know, you put garbage in your head, and that's what you're gonna have come back out of you. And I think I stopped. Same thing I stopped watching news years ago because I just feel like there was so much negativity and it wasn't adding any value to my life whatsoever, like, Well, how you gonna know about expires? The I'm like, I'm not I don't care. I think I can't control it. Because if I can't control it are affected in a positive way. I don't need to know about it.

spk_1:   42:14
No, man. You and I was still a like spoke.

spk_0:   42:18
Well, I I left my favorite kind of podcast and then the other thing not to try mirror you, but this that Ah, I just started doing. Actually, this year is as a habit for me Is I every day and trying to, like, you think focus on the positive scripture of some sort of kind of comes to mind when I first wake up, and I'll kind of repeat it a couple times in my head. Very Tony Robbins esque, you know, And ah, but then the other habit, as I used to have a really bad habit of very quickly after I got up, the worst thing I could possibly do, which was probably check my email and check my Facebook to horrible choices. And so instead, what I'm doing now is actually switched to a paper planner, which is kind of a crazy move for somebody who's a tech geek like me. And, um, I do open up my iPhone. But I opened up the Bible app on there, look at the verse of the day and actually write that verse today as the first thing in my planner. And that has been so powerful to me because it just focuses what really matters. No one when the whirlwind of the day pops up, you know, from all the things that are a reality in life, it's kind of like, Well, you have that, like, grounding anchor Point. That's been that's been a really powerful thing for me.

spk_1:   43:24
I love it, man. I get it. That's that's the first. The first thing I do in the mornings get my kids to school. But during that time, I get 20 minutes of Scripture study in, and that's a big, big deal for me, too.

spk_0:   43:35
Yep, love it. Any parting thoughts? Any other advice for people out there who, you know, been in business a couple years of trying to figure it out? And they want to build a business that last any parting faults that you leave them at the end of this episode?

spk_1:   43:47
Yeah. This doesn't work. For every What we talked about today doesn't work for everybody. Yeah, some people personalities, just that it doesn't work. But you don't know that until you try it. And if it doesn't work for you, find, you know, like you're out a couple 100 bucks. If it works for you, you bought time, and that's that changes the world, right? So you have to give it a shot. Whether you use online jobs, a PhD or you use up work or whatever you do, I don't care. Just try it and see if hiring a full time person that's critical full time versus hourly doesn't doesn't change things for you. Thank you

spk_0:   44:25
so much for being on the podcast today. You're exactly my favorite kind of hosts and and really, it sounds like we have a lot of, ah, belief alignment. If you're curious to learn more about John and his business, go check out online jobs up each. They've actually got a education taboo in there with all kind of additional training and details on things that might be helpful for you. John, thanks again for being on building a business that less thanks for having me. I hope this episode has given you some ideas or inspiration that will help you grow your business if you found it helpful, and you know somebody else who might benefit from it as well. I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to share this with him, maybe on Facebook or Twitter, or linked in, or even shoot an email over to a friend with a link to this podcast in it. And if you haven't already, make sure you sign up for email list at building a business that lasts dot com.