What is a success if you can't share it with someone? And to be fair, it's almost impossible to build an online business without having the dream team on your side. So, what are the steps you need to take to build a remote team that will stand by you through thick and thin?
The first thing you need to do as a boss is to define exactly what someone's job will be, how long it should take them to do the job, and how much you will pay them. When you don't exactly know what you want from someone it is going to be very difficult for them to do it.
To find out more listen to today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
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Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM180: Building a Team Without Breaking the Bank appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
What is a success if you can't share it with someone? And to be fair, it's almost impossible to build an online business without having the dream team on your side. So, what are the steps you need to take to build a remote team that will stand by you through thick and thin?
The first thing you need to do as a boss is to define exactly what someone's job will be, how long it should take them to do the job, and how much you will pay them. When you don't exactly know what you want from someone it is going to be very difficult for them to do it.
To find out more listen to today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM180: Building a Team Without Breaking the Bank appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
(00:00): Building a team without breaking the bank. Find out on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Novo, the no fee business bank that refunds fees charged by other ATS. Even internationally get $25 when you sign up today at servenomaster.com/novo that's N O V O.(00:15): Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams. Now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep presented. Live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. (00:45): You guys, I'm still under lockdown. I'm in the garden. I've got two dogs at my feet, got my trusty golden retriever. And then we've got a new puppy that is running around right to my feet right now. Now, hopefully you won't hear them barking in the background, but we both know that hope doesn't take you very far. There are the neighbours rooster and the dog barking because he heard the rooster. So we're going to have some background noise. I do the best I can. The dogs like me or quarantine. So we're all living in this environment and hopefully this episode will come out after the quarantine is lifted. But since I have so much extra time where I'm trapped in the garden, it's nothing I can do, but record. So I want to give you guys a lot, lot, lot of content. They were going to talk about building a remote team, and I want to take you through my journey and why I think this is so powerful right now. (01:27): I have a couple of rules as part of my process. And when I first wrote the outline for this episode, I actually wrote this outline two or three years ago. And at the time my first note says, I don't have a VA and that's still true. I currently have eight people that work for me directly and at least three other people that are working through agencies where I'm paying them similar salaries, but they're, I hired them through an agency and the agency manages them because they're specialists and then have other people that are higher project. I probably still have what I consider to be a very large team. I am paying 10 to 11 salaries every single month. It's a lot, it's a lot to grow to, but I don't have that personal assistant every time. I think I'm going to create someone who's going to be in charge of managing me and be my assistant. (02:07): They end up going into another role. The most recent person I hired for that specific job is now basically completely in charge of the podcast. And that's such a full time job, everything from the SEO briefs and the topics that we put together to making sure the videos and the audio is edited through show notes and transcriptions and uploading, writing the descriptions, all of that. So I still don't have a virtual assistant and I know a lot of people, that's the first thing they talk about hiring. It just never worked right for me when we don't know what we want someone to do, it's hard for them to do it. And this is the lesson that's so critical is that you have to really clearly define what someone's job is going to be, how long it should take them to handle each of the tasks within that job. (02:51): And what are you going to pay them for those tasks? The reasoning to do that is so that you can estimate. We talked in our last episode about fast and slow money. How can I tell if someone's a good investment? If I can't see the end result of their work? So the first person that I hired on my current team, the person who's been with me the longest is Alice. The editor. Alice is amazing. And when all of my revenue, when the majority of my revenue was coming through Amazon and came through my books and putting out more and more books, she was a critical part of the team. She was a necessary component, and did an amazing job. And she's still an amazing editor, which is a super, super valuable part of the team. And her role is clearly, clearly defined. Alice doesn't do ghost writing and does not write blog posts. (03:32): Alice doesn't write original content at all. She fixes the content that I write. Now we have had her do more or less different types of tasks over the years. I've sometimes had her handling everything from the moment I finish a transcription all the way till just about it's ready to publish in a format, but it's always fallen into that role after I've written it before I publish it, is that space where she is. And she's an expert, a specialist, and it's much easier to hire specialists for specific tasks. Now, if you think about that for a moment, hiring a full time editor, you say to yourself, do I have that many hours of editing that I need over time? The value of hiring an editor full time versus project based is that you can get a much better deal because they have security. So you get something that's more affordable over time, but I have paid a large amount of money over the past few years, if you add it all up, but she does a great job. (04:22): She's excellent in her work. When you're thinking about hiring someone and maybe the first rule you would need is a VA. And that's because if you're small and you're a one person band, and you're a Jack of all trades, which means you do everything. And that certainly applies to me. You can't afford to hire 50 people. You want to hire someone who can do lots and lots of different tasks, and the challenge can be, can they do a task when you describe it or do you have to provide a really detailed checklist and process? I record a lot of training videos using loom. It's my favorite tool. It's a free video recording tool and you can see a link to loom in the show notes. It's use loom.com. And what's good about this tool is that you could, when you record a video and immediately saves it on their website and they don't force you to upgrade until you've recorded, like I don't know, 50 videos, and then they go, Oh, we'll start deleting old ones unless you pay our fee. (05:05): And so that's what I upgraded after two years, cause I've recorded so many training videos, but it's a really great tool. You also download your videos, upload them to YouTube for free, and then delete the old ones. So I've been using loom for a really long time. I recorded a training video just last night. I recorded a 27 minute video explaining my Kanban board, my project management for the cards moving from left to right of the checklists. And I shared it with three different people who work as part of the podcast process. They call see the, all the big picture process, see the checklist of the processes that he made and then understand where each process starts and ends. So you might not be able to give instructions that are written down, maybe really good at that. And that's okay. But when you're hiring someone, keep in mind, what level instruction does this person require in order to accomplish the task? (05:50): So there are really two types of people that you could hire. One is the person who's the thinker. A thinker is someone who's like a manager or a high level creative person. The thinker is really good at creating their own. SOP is at defining workflows at organizing my project management boards, all those processes, which are just so valuable. That's what the thinker does. And the thinker is excellent at planning the big picture and viewing the danger. And the problem with the thinker is that sometimes we have tasks that are repetitive that have to be doing the same thing over and over again, like watching the video of every single one of my podcasts over the course of two weeks, the whole back catalog and writing YouTube descriptions and coming up with YouTube tags for each one of those that could be very, very boring for a thinker because it's too repetitive. (06:35): Even worse is if you have a process, that's almost exactly the same every week. We're posting the same content every single week or answering the same emails, anything what's a really, really repetitive process. Now the thinker will fit well in that role, but the doer or the action taker, someone who's really good at just doing things, but they need a really clearly defined set of tasks in front of them. You give them a checklist and say work through this. It can take them time to learn it, but once they do, they could do it over and over and over again. A great example.This, I had a friend when I was in college, he was from my hometown. He didn't go to college. He got a job working at a car factory and he used to bolt the back seat and do a card bolt. (07:13): The backseat knew 80 to a hundred per day in the factory. And he loved his job. He was someone who I thought would never go anywhere in life because he couldn't figure out where he fit in, but he found his role. And I wanna make this absolutely clear. Doers are such an important part of the team. You need a lot more doers than thinkers because I need a lot more implementation than I do strategy. Now, this means when you're hiring a VA or hiring your first employee, you'll start to go through that process of how do I, you know, see what's the right type of person to hire? What kind of person do I want to bring on the team? Do I need a thinker or doer? And it comes down to how good are you at defining the task? So, because of my condition, it's hard for me to spend time on the computer shooting lots of those training videos. (07:56): I wish I could do them all the time. I wish I could really work and design all of my boards by myself. So I have people on the team I have about two or three people who are really, really good at thinker work who are really good at reorganizing the boards, coming up with strategy, doing new and different tasks. Every single week, the rest of my team, they do a lot of repetitive tasks that are critical. So their ability to do the same thing over and over again without making mistakes and without getting bored is so useful. By video editor, we edit similar videos all the time. So the process he goes through is very similar for every single video, if that was boring to him, or if he was really always looking to do it, I want to do different types of videos every single week that would have work. (08:37): So when I hire someone, it's not always just about how good are they at the test task? It's can they fill the role I need, which is to do the same thing over and over again, or to lead a team. And there's a cool management book that my friend turned me on to that says for every seven people you hire, you need a manager. And that's about right. I'm finding with the size of my team more and more of the tasks I'm assigning are management tasks. Now we have one large manager and then someone who does a small bit of managing and then they also encourage people to manage each other. So we set up systems where people are in charge of different processes. I'll put someone in charge of one board and then they can assign tasks, other people across that board that need to get done and then have another board that someone else was in charge of. (09:18): So they can be in charge of a process and manage our assigned tasks to other people. And that's how we are slowly growing. But as I grow, if I grow to 15 employees I'll need another manager. If I grow to 20 employees on the third manager, because in that five to six range, so I might need two or three thinkers to go with 15 to 20 doers. How I build up my team for every five to seven employees that need a manager. So those are a different skill. Now, when you're thinking about hiring someone for a task, my school thought is that you need to follow the 80% hiring rule. The 80% hiring rules. If someone couldn't do a job 80% as good as you, then it's worth outsourcing and hiring them, they can always get better. And you can also always use your time more effectively. (09:58): We talked to the last episode about how much your time is worth. And if you can hire someone to do a task 80% as well as you for $5 an hour, okay, let's just say it's a flat $5 an hour to do an easy number. If you can make $10 an hour doing something else, you can get paid for an hour of work and pay to other people to do an hour of work. And even though each of them is 80% as good of you, the end result is 160% of what you could accomplish in the same amount of time. You've actually improved what you're capable of exponentially. Now the dream is to hire people that are better than you at every task you do. That's hard. Have you spent all your time chasing the idea that you'll never build a team. There are certain tasks that I'm really, really great at. (10:40): I don't think anyone could write blog posts for self mastery, as good as me, but I physically can't. And this is the rule I use for hiring writers. I have Paris review. All of these writers. I sent out five test articles that all we're and end up on the website, or hopefully will be uploaded before this episode comes up because we're in the middle of finishing the final design of the website. We finished the move, the web designer all served a master move from the assignment of the page builder. Now it's assigned to the developer who does the backend code and the fixing of the security and all the fancy stuff. And he's really, really advanced. He's amazing. But when I'm hiring people for a specific task, I look it and go, can they do it? 80% is good to me. That's the baseline. If you're always looking for someone that's as good as he was hard, because we all think we're the best. (11:19): We all have hype in his or herself. We're a lot. We ended up really good at a lot of stuff. When we're learning our online skills, whatever business model you build, you go through this process where you master lots and lots and lots of different skills. And so you don't want to give up what you're really good at. And this can be hard. I went through this a lot just saying, well, what kind of team should I build? And this could actually mean that if you're still working for someone else they use, if you have a daytime job, okay, you work eight hours a day for a hundred dollars a day and you're hiring people for $5 now, or you can spend eight hours of your time and get back 20 hours. Is there time to double your output per day? It's kind of a crazy decision. (11:56): Calculus is something a little bit advanced, but I want to share with you because I know some of you were still working or were working for home and working for how to use our time. Well, we discover when we work from home that we can accomplish a lot more when we're not pretending to work. And we all know what I'm talking about. There's a big study that says most people spend the average American worker in an office and spend six hours a day, checking email, or pretending to check email in two hours a day. Working. I'm certainly guilty of this in my last few jobs, I'll get my tasks done so fast. My manager, who wasn't a creative thinker, didn't know what to do. Cause her number one priority was making it look like she was good at her job. So I had to make it look like I was working. (12:27): I'm sure many of us have had managers like that. And if you have, why don't you leave a comment below this video? Cause I'd love to hear about that. Well, I know that I'm not the only person that had a manager that had been promoted to beyond the level of their competence. So it's critical to answer this question. What is your time worth? I was on a webinar last week where the presenter said I charged $5,000 an hour for consulting and I get paid because I do fortune 500 consulting, but I said, wow, it's 10 times what I charge this. Person's on a phone call with me. I'm getting 10 times the value I'm giving. And I have a lot of friends who are more expensive than me. I thought charging $5 an hour is a lot. It's one of my dad charges a corporate lawyer who was very well known to respect his industry, but it turns out maybe it's inflation or maybe it's other things that even though I think $5 an hour is a lot of money. (13:09): And so I give a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Usually what I do a consulting call goes more than an hour or a coaching call goes beyond the hour limit. There's other people that are more expensive. I'm working with a client right now on a project. And I said, here's how much it costs you. You have to spend three hours on the phone as part of the process. He goes, Oh, well this is what I charge per hour. She'll actually have to pay me to work with me. It was joking, but it showed me that a lot of people do charge a great deal of money per hour, that $500. Isn't the limit. It turns out there's a lot further you can go. And what that means is you can do a coaching call and then redirect that money to your team. It's not the only way to do it, but it's the way to think about it is there's this mistake we make. (13:44): And I want to dial into this because it's so critical that we'll do a low money task because of a poor financial calculus. We'll say, you know what? I'm going to spend four hours uploading blog posts today, or are updating social media today. I could pay someone else $20 to do it. So I'm doing it myself. I'm saving $20. But if you really believe your time is worth $10 an hour or $20 an hour. You're actually losing $60 because time you could spend. Now, it's hard to give your time of concrete value. If you don't have a salary or clients that you could spend that time with, but that is what I have to do. Every single week. I spent a lot of money on my salary. I spend more on salary now than I was paid at my last job. It's not quite double it right now, but it'll probably be within the next three months. Speaker 1 (14:25): By the end of the year, it might be triple or quadruple what I was making at my last full time job. So that salary every week, that's the first thing I have to make. And so my decision making calculus, my phase doesn't come from what an hour of my time is worth. It goes from how easily can I generate that each week we have it coming through passive income. Is it a number that's not hard or stressful for me to hit every week? And so that's kind of my overall team budget that when it's Friday, I'm not stressed out, we'll have enough money to pay. Cause I've been in that situation before. I never want to be there again. I want to be totally honest with you guys. This is the third team I built. The first team I built was significantly more expensive as well as making a ton of money and not really paying attention. (15:00): And I didn't know how to manage a team. And so many people on the team were ripping me off. In fact, almost every single person eventually got fired because I realized they were charging me for hours. They weren't working and I didn't really know how to manage it. Didn't really learn that process. And so since then, I've learned that you have to really set structures in place. And this is a mistake I made with hires. You have to use time tracker software. You absolutely have to. I use time doctor, there's a link below. You got to serve a master at our conference last time doctor, and you can see the software I use. What's great about this software is that I can input everyone's different salary. Cause people get paid different amounts because they're experts in different areas. And so there's people that have some skills that are more expensive than others, but everyone's in a similar bandwidth. (15:38): There's not a huge difference. And it can tell me, Oh, here's what your maximum could be each week. If people work their maximum hours, cause not everyone always works their full 20 or for 40 hours. Sometimes people only work eight hours or 13 hours. And sometimes they work 42 hours. They work a little overtime. And the reason you have to use time-tracking software is that it creates a field of integrity. So the best way to say it, because if people can just charge you and you get without any tracking, you get a big bill one day and you don't know how they spent their time, the very least or wondering what happened. And you have no way to audit other than accusing them. Now, this hasn't happened to me, but one of my friends with a larger team has had it. People who were working for him and their son came and used the computer and were playing a video game. Speaker 1 (16:19): And the time tracker didn't catch it. That's why the time tracker takes a screenshot. Every certain number of minutes or certain number of seconds we set it up because sometimes it misses something normally catches. If the person's not working on it, a list of tasks. So it automatically catches. If someone's doing a task they shouldn't be doing. And this allows me to look back and see what someone is actually doing. I don't do this all the time. I'm not heavy checking the screenshots. But if someone else on the team who does that, who checks to see if people are doing, they're supposed to, and this tells me the hours and when people send me payment requests at the end of the week, every week, I say, how many hours did you work? Give me a rundown of what you worked on, what you accomplished, kind of a quick summary. Speaker 1 (16:53): And then I check and see if it matches the time doctor. And it's helpful because I have so many employees. How else can I keep track of them? Because everyone's working from home. So it's not a lack of trust actually creates an environment where there's no confusion. There's not the room for an accusation because it's arbitrary. Now I have had employees who said, Oh, taking the screenshots is really invasive. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I said, no problem. You can find somewhere else to work because it has to be consistent. I can't have some employees have it. And not others. What is hard is if you hire an employee and then you add in this technology telling them, Hey, I want to start time tracking. That feels to them like an accusation. It is hard to change. So I actually put in, every time I post a job opening, I say, here's how we work. (17:31): I pay every Friday. Ideally I can pay you on PayPal, but I can't pay all my employees that way after you several other platforms, because people in countries where they don't have access to PayPal and use time-tracking job where you have to be comfortable with that, don't bother applying, applying if you're not, because there's no other way for me to manage to the traditional office is everyone's in the same room managers walking around the room and looking everyone's computer screens. Because my team works from home. That's a virtual way of looking at their screen and it keeps a permanent record. There's other time tracking tools out there. I just happen to use a time doctor because that's what my friend uses. And so he said use it. So I use it and I've never had a problem with it. It's been a good experience and it keeps it really, really simple. (18:05): Now when you're hiring someone, should you go full time, part time or contract? I'll take you through each of those. A full time employee is someone you have to get 40 hours of work a week to when I hire people, I always hire them at part time, with the possibility of applying to full time, I just upped one of my employees for 20 to 40 hours yesterday. Usually I say, there'll be a trial period of three months or 12 weeks where you're going to work 20 hours a day at this salary. And that allows me to have time to train the person. That means that the person's making a massive mistake. I've cut how far they can go down the wrong path. And half I have had people work on the wrong tasks or misunderstand me or go down the wrong way. Some people will not, will be unsure of an answer. (18:43): And so they won't take action until they hear back from me. Other people will just go down the wrong path and not tell me until I check their screenshots or check their work. And I go, what are you doing? That's not what I said at all. So you start learning that employees have different approaches to problem solving. And again, this is how they, where they are on the thinker to action taker. Spectrum. Ideal employee is someone who, when you give them a task and they're not sure they will send you the questions and then they'll work on another task. They're sure of until they hear back from you. So I have an employee who, every time he asked me a question, it's a really good question. Every time he asked the question, I go, that's totally reasonable. I wasn't clear enough. Fair enough. Here's the answer.(19:16): But he doesn't not work for the whole day until he hears back from me, he just works on something else on the list. That's the right mindset. Not everyone has that mindset. So that requires training and people don't get there until they work with you for a long time. So when you're first starting out, a contract might be the best thing. And that's why you pay project by project. An example of this is that I have my Kindle description tool. One of the first things I had someone build, this was a while ago. I hired them through Ilana before it became Upwork. It was a developer. I said, Oh, what I really want to do is have a little program that helps me to generate my Amazon description. HTML. There's some other tools out there, but there's certain things I don't like about them. Let me help me to build my own.(19:52): And they did. It costs me $300. I'll give you the real number. This was about three years ago. The reason it's on my mind is that we're redoing it. My developer's going to redo it now and make it like 50 times better. We're moving it from another website to the server of astrocyte. Again, we'll post a link in the show notes and below this video. So you can see that tool in action where it is constantly improving it to make it really, really good. But we have templates built in with really great book descriptions. And you can just kind of go through and replace words and follow the formatting and have a pretty good book description. Even though you've never done it for him though, you're not a master copywriter. We're actually in the process of adding some new HTML that's allowed and some new templates. (20:25): So you can choose from several different types of templates to start from to make it really awesome. Easy for you. So initially the person I hired was a contract. Their value of a contract is, you know what? It's going to cost. I've used contract workers for a lot of tasks for the comic book. When I hired someone to convert, served a master into a comic book script, that was a contract. It was a flat fee. I knew it was going to cost for the artwork. Same thing. The problem with the contract is you pay more. The benefit is you don't have to worry about mission creep or surprise billing. What can happen when you have an open ended task? If you don't say, I want you to do this, you have four hours, a lot of this task. If you don't give a time limit to a task, they can work on something. (21:03): My friend was telling me about someone, one of his employees, I gave her a task that would take me if I was going really hard and doing super deep research for about an hour and took 16 hours. And I said, Whoa, that's a lot of hours, half a week to two full workdays to do an hour task. Now, if the person can get faster and faster, that's great. I've had the same thing. I had someone who I had to let go about eight months ago or six months ago because every task he did, he would fail. And I had to work on a task, which took an hour, took about eight hours. I said, what's happening? What took so long? And when they can't explain why it took so long, that's when you have to start worrying and you have to start assigning that person time limits to put a frame around them so that they don't spend too long on a task. (21:43): And I have to do this. Want to have Alex doing special editing tasks. I have to really control because she's a perfectionist. Totally understandable. She might spend eight hours on a task that the budget's a one hour for, especially if it's from a client or it's a smaller task. So with certain employees or certain tasks, depending upon your budget contract can be the right thing to do because there's no surprise. You know what? It's going to cost a lot to finish the job. Now this is a type of gambling for the person you're hiring. The person you're hiring puts in a bid and they're hoping they can get it done in a certain amount of time. If the job takes longer than they thought they don't get paid extra money. So they end up in a place where like, I just want to finish this job, right? (22:20): So they're trying to have a really clearly fine task for you really limit how many revisions or questions or change requests you can make. So really when you're starting out, probably first you'll hire people contract, then you'll go to part time and then you'll go to full time as you grow and can have a large budget for like I've said recently, you know that I want to hire more people. Actually, the first thing I need to do, and the thing with this last night is move all of my people who are still at 20 hours a week up to 40. Now some of them are in their twenties, all they want to do, or that's the band, what they have available, but the other ones, yeah, I want to grow. So that's what I need to focus on. First is increasing the amount of risk amount of budget I have every week to grow over the salary to where they want to be.(22:53): So they have full security, so they don't have to do other part time work. Don't have to work for any other people. They don't have to do filler work. They can just work for me. And that's the next part of my process. So the danger is the overhead blues. About seven years ago, I made way too much money. And my overhead got really big and it reached a certain point, including my assistant. I did have an assistant, but she was an in person assistant that was a virtual assistant where every single week I had to put in extra hours to make enough money to pay everyone. And that's what it felt like. I started to feel like I was working for my team. So there's a lesson. Something I talk about when you're an employee, is that your boss tries to pay you as low as they can to do a job that they need.(23:32): And you have to generate more money than they're paying you. So whatever you're paid right now, you're making more money. Otherwise they wouldn't have you on board. You're generating more revenue now for my team. That's the sum of their parts. What I look at each person's job. I say, how much does the work they're doing generate? And because I've been doing this for a decade now, I'm better at estimating that. And so I can really tell what I can afford to invest in each part of the business. Right now, I'm about to spend a lot of money on a contract worker for blog posts and podcast descriptions, no longer will I write the descriptions that go with these episodes, someone on my team will write the descriptions that go in the podcast description. If you're looking at your iPhone or your phone app, if you're looking on YouTube, but then we're actually hired outside article writers for the actual blog post.(24:12): So if you're looking at this unserved master and there's text below the little glare, that's something I pay a contract worker to do in addition to all the other blog posts coming out. So when I looked at those, I had a discussion with my friend and he was like, Oh, you know, I have one friend who pays really low. I don't know how he gets those workers. Another friend is paying more than me. I'm kind of in the middle, but I know what I can afford. I know, okay, this is what I could spend in a blog post because I know it will generate that much money in revenue or new traffic or opt-ins over time. And I say, this is how much money I have to put in to invest in growth in that part of the business. So there's this decision making calculus each time, the beauty of an overhead thing of a contract worker, as you pay it, once, you know, it's going to be, you know what you're going to get at the end. (24:51): So I know what I can pay to get 10 articles, which is two and a half months of content. So if I just look at five times that number, that's a blog post a week for the rest of the year, basically. So I can really estimate that I actually was going through a process. I was trying to hire an in house writer, someone to work with me full time. The challenge with that is that I don't know how long each article is going to take for them. And they might be faster or slower and it can be hard. That's a specialist that's hard to pay per hour. It's much more common for that particular specialty to pay per word. So I finally said, you know, what? In house is it working in the house? It's not making sense. I did a lot of research. My friend hired someone in house and he's actually going to switch to the service I'm using because it's too stressful for his in house person. (25:30): He says things to me all the time. I have one friend. I have a lot of friends in Tommy. These aren't all the same friends who say, I'm always trying to come up with work for someone on my team to do. That's not the place you want to be in. So you have this overhead. It becomes what you're thinking about all the time. So as you take people on, you have a responsibility and it's, I'm kind of like the social contract you're into democracy. The idea is that they have a loyalty to you to do a certain amount of tasks and you have responsibility to them to take care of them and provide them for work. Like right now, there's a lot of people worried about the shift in the economy and my response to that risk and nervousness could be okay, shrink the team. (26:02): If I eliminate the whole team, my income level will stay the same. My gross won't change, but my net will go up massively. And that's one mindset. My mindset is the opposite. My mindset is I need to make sure I'm there for people. Some people are going to need more hours. So people are gonna need more adaptability. How can I take care of them? And it's that balance. Okay. As long as I'm able to, I want to support my team in every way possible. And it becomes a little bit of a responsibility. And that's when you're in the employee employer relationship. And of course that's because I've been an employee and I want to be a better employer than I was worker. I don't even better than the bosses I used to have. So when you're looking at your hiring, someone write down your budget before you talk to any employee. (26:42): So when I'm hiring some for a contract, you know, this is my budget. This is what I can afford. One of hiring someone full time and they go, Oh, this is what I want to say. Look, this is my budget. If it's too low for you, I totally understand. I'll hire someone else. And sometimes that's what I do. I don't always hire the best person. I hire the best person who can take the salary I have available. The salaries I pay are based on my overall budget. You know, sports teams have like a spending cap. They have a maximum of money. They can spend on the team. And then they divided books. All the players. That's how my budget works. I have a certain amount of money I can spend every week that I don't want to go over because it puts me into an area where I'm not sure I can afford it. (27:14): And I don't want to go to that area. I want to be sure every single week. So sometimes please, they ask for more hours. I can't afford it long term. I said, Oh, I could afford this week, but maybe not next week. And so I don't give him a lot of extra hours. I say, Oh, I want to keep this number of hours because I know I can pay you this much, every single week for the foreseeable future. Whereas if I give you a ton of hours, now it might be in three weeks that we have a problem. And I have to cut back your hours where I have to give you a hiatus or cut you from the team. So my thought is always long view, long view, long view. I want people to be working with me for months, years, years, decades. I don't really want to have any turnover. (27:44): I love my team right now. I'm so happy with the team I have built right now to be three tries to get here. So the final thing I want to talk to me about is staff sources. Where can you hire people from now? I'm looking at this list. And again, it's massively changed over the past few years. It's funny. I find all these old outlines because I just write outlines all the time. It's my favorite thing to do. And I often find that things well, things change don't they? So I'm going to take you through the order of things. The first place I'm going to recommend is not on my initial list. It's called job rack.edu. Job back is amazing. You can go to serve at a restaurant conference, last job rec I'll put a link in the show notes as always. And if you're from Eastern Europe or if you've never worked with him from Easter, a boy will throw a thumbs up because they're amazing. (28:23): Throughout my career, I've gotten through hiring a lot of people from the Philippines and a lot of people from South Africa. And currently most of my team is from Eastern Europe. And boy, they are good. Their English is solid. The work ethic is amazing. A job rack is owned by a guy named Knoll who I've met in person. Once he remembers me better than I remember him, but we emailed back and forth all the time. Few other websites, you'll actually see a video testimonial. I recorded my garden last week for him. He didn't ask me for a testimonial. I was thinking about my team. And I said, you know what? My stress is that there's no one on my team. That's the first person I'd cut. If I have to let go of one person, I don't know who would be because they're all amazing. (28:56): And I realized the majority of the team came from him. So the beauty of job rack is that it's a contract, most employment platforms. You pay a monthly fee to be allowed to post jobs, or to have a certain number of active jobs and have a certain number of conversations, job, Rocky pay per posting. And sometimes I hire, in fact, I have hired two people from the same job before. What's really great about them is that there are smaller. If you are bigger than me and you want to pay them for a white glove thing where they do the whole process for you, you can, but I'm hiring. I hire so many people like I'd rather put the time, myself, learn how to get good at hiring, which I have. And as part of that process, he actually sent me, Oh, here's two really good examples, article a job posts that we have, look at those and model your posts on them. (29:36): So that's why my job posts look similar because I follow this template. They gave me and I really refine that each time I post a job, that's why people go, Jonathan, I saw you posted eight jobs. Last six months. I thought I finally applied to one that fit me. So people notice that when I'm at a hiring spree, that's my favorite platform to hire from. In fact, I closed my other two accounts by other, on other platforms and I'm religious books on Java. Cause I just keep getting great people. I have had some people that weren't the right fit from there. And that's my fault. The good thing is when you don't have someone's right fit, you tell them. And at least for me, sometimes they'll give you, they'll help you out to get to replace or help you to find another person to fill that role or let you post a new job and give you another credit, whatever it is because they're more open to working with you.(30:15): You feel like you're working with a real boutique agency, as opposed to feeling like you're just working with a website where all you're talking to is another VA. That's getting underpaid to answer your questions in the chat box. So I've been really, really happy with working with them. The second place that I'll talk about is outsourcing outsource Lee is what I would call ups and downs. Sometimes I get really great applicants and sometimes I get really, it's not the right fit. Outsource is where I hired my editor from she's been a great employee. She was outsourced. It was really, really amazing consistently. A few years ago, the last few times I posted on there, it just has been a lot harder to get through. And I was part of my hiring process. Basically I have a test. So for every single task, before I post the job, I sit down and fight her to find a test because I need to see the perception to it. (30:58): Everyone can say they can do something. I create a small test. For example, for a video editor, I have the same video clip. I have everyone's edits. I have the whole, little folder in Dropbox. They posted, like I said, here's all the assets and the task is in there in the word document, read it and then do it. And because it's the same task, even when I'm hiring a new editor, if I hire a new video editor a couple of years or add a second video to the team, I can compare it to everyone who's ever done an application. So it's a consistent part of the process. What I've noticed is that almost everyone on job back does the test, no questions, no problem. There's different levels of quality. Sometimes the tests can be harder. I was hiring a developer. I explained the problem I was having. (31:31): And I said, describe to me how you would approach the solution. And some people just wrote answers. They go, I definitely don't want to do that. And other people are like, well, I need, I need access to this, this and this. I need you to give me access to your developer account and to access to the backend of your website, your accent, to the back of this. And then I can figure out how I would approach it. I was like, okay, no, that's not the right person for me, even though their solution, might've been really excellent. I need to work with someone who can explain it to me and dumb speak. My developer is way smarter than me. He understands stuff at a really high level because he's great at his job. I understand the basics. Like I know how to format a blog post. (32:04): I've done minor changes to HTML pages, minor, minor, copy, and paste I'm talking about, but he can do amazing things. And he's like, Oh, you know, we don't even need a WordPress theme. I said, Whoa, that's a language I don't even understand. But he's able to explain it to me in a way that I get. And the other thing is that he's actually friends with another one of my employees. So when my other employees said, actually this guy is somewhat a good guy. I was like, well, he had the best answer and you got a recommendation for the team. He's on board. And they actually worked together all the time. What's great about them being already friends is that they aren't afraid to communicate with each other and get stuff done in a really great way. We're also both drawback hires, but outsource Lee, you can find really good people outsource that you will also find a lot of Westerners. (32:43): So you actually find people in England, America, Canada, which you don't find on the other job platforms I use. So that sort of thing can be hit or miss if you use my linked out source. So you get a hundred dollars credit, which is enough for like five months at the lowest tier plan. I think it's $19 a month right now. So it's more than enough time to use it and try it out and actually be able to communicate with people, possibly hire someone. You may find the right person to outsource Lee. I've just been really, really, really lucky with my job. And that's not everyone. That's just me. Another friend who does really well at other platforms. And some people outsource is the right place. So it's usually worth it when I post a job, I'll post on all three platforms, but I'm not hiring anyone right now. (33:17): So I froze. I outsourced the account. I lowered it to a free level because I don't want to keep paying, what am I looking for a new person right now? The third place to look is online jobs.ph my personal experience on all my jobs at pH is that people never do the test. That a lot of people who are horrible, that are qualified apply for the job. You get a hot and large number of applicants, but more of them are copy and paste. So job brackets, all really custom applications. So you don't get a lot of obligations. It's a much smaller network. Outsource Lee. I get about 50 to 60% copy and paste. They didn't agree with the job as they just saw the category and applied, applied, applied online jobs. It's almost 90%, at least of people who didn't even read the job. And they apply for jobs that are way outside their skillset.(33:55): And they just want to get hired. Even they have no idea what the job is. So on every platform to get a little bit of that. Now my friend has a team, that's about three or four times bigger than mine. He almost exclusively hires all my jobs. He gets amazing people. He's got a real gift for hiring on online jobs and he had bad luck. Every time he's on the job rack, he's gotten bad results. So that's why I'm giving you multiple platforms and explaining why they're different. Now, each of these, you pay in a different way again on the jobs. It's like a monthly fee and you're able to have three active jobs at any one time. You can even post jobs for free, but to be able to communicate or to get jobs like approved really fast, you have to gotta pay an account. (34:27): So that's what I've always done there. And again, it comes down to how well you define the job. So if you're not really clear on what you ask, you might, you're going to get a lot of people that might not be the right fit because you don't know what you want and they don't know what you're looking for. So you get that vagueness. The next place you can look. Number four is Upwork. Upwork used to be E-Lance. Then it got merged with oDesk, oDesk bought E-Lance and I barely use Upwork workout. I find it very, very, very hard to use. They've done a lot of things. They really shifted. It used to be great for people like me, like smaller businesses or individuals who are hiring small tasks. They really try to turn it into a corporate asset. So before I could mess it, I could post a job and I could look and I could invite 20 or 30 people. (35:09): The job that I thought were the right fit. And I'll get, you know, a bunch of applications that hire the best person. Now I'm only allowed to invite three people and people are only allowed to bid on like three jobs a month or something. So they are very likely to apply to a job unless they absolutely sure they're going to get it. So you've actually created an environment that I find a lot harder to operate in. So I'm pulling away from that platform right now that may shake out that there's a new alternative coming out or something. But right now I find it hard to hire on there. So it's possible. It's just because of the process right now, because they've changed it so much. I just, it's not worth the hassle to me because I tend to, right now I'm not really doing contract hiring anyways, for all the things that would do contract. (47): For example, I was actually thinking about hiring a contract team to update like Kindle description generator. And they're talking to my developer and he goes, Oh yeah, I can do that. And it will take me this many hours. I was like, Oh man, so much better than just give him more hours and have him do it. The fifth place you can look as in Facebook groups, depending upon what type of person you're looking for. So I've actually looked for someone who's super high level. There's a high level position. That's called an online business manager. And that's someone who basically takes over operations for a business like mine. They're quite expensive. And a lot of them, they're not the right fit for you. But when you get to the higher level, you have to go to those special groups that are special virtual assistant groups. Speaker 1 (36:24): Now those people, there are a lot more expensive than professional virtual assistants. I saw someone in the group who said how many other virtual assistants at the group make a hundred thousand dollars a year? And I was like, Whoa, I'm definitely not looking to pay my VA six figures. There's nothing wrong with that. More power to those people. But they're looking to work for like Silicon Valley startups. They're looking to work for the type of companies. They are spending other people's money. You know, when a company gets investment, the first thing they do is get like bigger offices, nicer chairs for everyone, ping pong tables and all of that stuff. And so the way they spend money is very different from how I spend money. Cause every single penny that comes into serving a master feels like it's my penny. So I want to spend it as wisely as possible, but those groups do exist. Speaker 1 (36:58): If you're actually doing consulting work or contract work, they can be great groups to join, to find work cause there's tons of stuff going on in there. So that's the right fit for me. Those are people that are looking to work for a different type of company than I am. And that's totally fine. So I haven't had great success hiring from Facebook groups. The other place that can be really great is if you have an existing following, then you can email your list. And I have done this. You know, I have tried working with people from my following in the past. It has been ups and downs. I tend to be better at working with an intern for my following because that's someone who instead of paying them, I do training and that's because they usually need a lot of training to really figure out what I need.(37:30): Great example, this is Paris. Paris started as an intern. I posted ads saying, Oh, you know what? I've taught people other things I want to do copywriting. I want a copywriting intern and work with Paris. And now she runs maybe 80% of the company. She's basically the number two, the vice president of serving a master. And she's really wonderful at her job. And she's building her own other business on the side at the same time. So she's doing really, really amazing things. And so people can start as an intern, turn to employ or turn really successful. And that can't be the right fit when I've hired people from my audience, that tends to be the intern path has been the right path, but I try to hire people directly. Hasn't really worked out. I have tried it in the past. It hasn't been the right thing for me. (38:05): That doesn't mean it will work for you. What's important to see is that I try lots of different things and it may very well be that in six months, if you reach out to me, I'm using a totally different platform drawback to no longer working for me, but it's good for, it's been good for me for a while. So I hope it maintains its quality. I have high hopes for Knoll and that's my process. Now I do want to say that actually interns can be my most expensive employees because I invest huge swaths of time in them. There's a reason I only work with one intern at a time. This was a really great book on management by the guy who took over Intel in the eighties and changed them from recovering. That makes Ram to company X processors, which means they shifted from a company, makes commodity. (38:40): Anyone can make Ram to a covenant and make something special. There's only two companies that make processors AMD and Intel. That's it. So it's much more, you have to stay cutting edge. After you go to RD, you have to have this whole approach. And one of the big things he teaches and I'm still working through the book, like always, I've never finished the books. I started that the responsibility of the boss or the manager is to teach. So with interns, I really got that for a long time. I didn't get that with paid employees. And I realized now I'm actually at any given time, I'm really focused on one of my employees. And I'm putting a lot of time into training them and a lot of time into answering their questions because I'm trying to build them up. This is why I try to hire one employee every three months. (39:14): Cause I know it takes you three months to train someone to where they're just humming along to where they're like so awesome. I have some employees who I'm looking to hire more people just to be their assistant. Like we're trying to grow so fast that there are people who are doing so well and were struggling three months ago and now they need it staff. It's amazing. So the process, and this is why I used to be really good insurance. I've always seen interns as somebody, you have to teach, but I'm like, I'm paying someone. Why would I teach them? Why would I pay someone to watch a training video? Right. But it's the opposite. Now. Now I do pay people to go through training and go through exercises and to learn and to grow because I see that when I train them and build them up long term, I get the return on that investment. (39:47): So I invest a lot of time in my team. I've tried to be available to them almost 24 seven because they'll work at different times. So I try to adapt to that. So that mindset of when you hire someone, yes, you hire the expert. But a lot of it can be, they can be really good. Like my developers are really good, but I have to guide him on which projects to work on. In which order he doesn't know if I show him 10 different projects, he can tell me how long each one will take. But he doesn't know which one is worth the most of the company. Cause that's a different type of assessment. That's outside of his area of expertise. So I began to teach him that so he could start doing more decision making calculus on his own. I go, well, this does this, this does that. (40:22): Here's why I want to do this. I was talking last night. I said, look, the reason I want to convert the website as quickly as possible, whether than anything else has, is because it's worth this much a day. Once we fix it, it will generate this many more email addresses this much more money every single day. And he goes, okay, now I get it. So understanding and it comes from the training and it means that your employees will stay more alignment with your vision and they will continue to grow. Now guys, thank you so much for spending time with me. Appreciate you listen to all the background noise. I really can't control my neighborhood. My nose is starting. Get a little stuffy. So maybe my voice got a little deeper. I apologize that that happened. But I want you to see and come with me on this journey. (40:54): Cause I love spending time with you. I don't want you to have more of a vision of where kind of team you want to build. I actually wrote down about a year ago, my dream team, I wrote down an order of operations, a toe table of operations of equipment. My team, I said, here's what I need. Here's what kind of salary I want for each person. Here's how many hours I want from them. And then I began filling in those roles. So I had a strategy. So having the long view can help you when it comes to building a team. And if you already have a team that you had some cool experiences, whether good streets or bad periods is, I'd love to hear about them. Please share them in the comments below. And I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve (41:34): know master. Make sure you subscribe. So you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race head over to servenomaster.com slash podcast. Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday, (42:01): ready to master the art of copywriting. Learn the most valuable online skill without spending a penny a tservenomaster.com/ultimate.