Nathan Hirsch - Outsourcing Tips and Tricks

hi everyone this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC and today I have a very special guest with me Nathan Hirsch his he was the founder of via platform and also now the founder the house first school Nathan welcome to our podcast and thank you for being here yeah thanks for ever me um lately I know that there have been some initiatives to build the outsource school can you tell us a little bit more about what it is and was it for yeah well I was a long time Amazon seller I did that for six seven years and I eventually built the free up marketplace based on my own frustrations using virtual assistants and freelancers and going up work or Fiverr and getting a hundred applicants and having to vet them myself and go through one by one by one and I just wanted a better experience so I've spent the past four years building up the free up marketplace we started it with $5,000 a platform that we would that be a stand freelancers before letting them in and make them available to clients quickly a lot of Amazon sellers marketing agencies Amazon agencies and then on the back end we would protect them with great support and a no turnover guarantee if if someone quit so we scaled that from $5,000 to eventually doing over 10 million dollars a year we were acquired a hundred days ago and throughout the past four years people have been asking me to launch a course on using VA c'e and I just really haven't had the time to do it because I've been focused on free up so now that I'm no longer part of free up and we finished the transition we want to launch an education platform we want to teach everyone everything we really know about virtual assistants and it all starts with our first course our iota method which is interviewing onboarding training managing IOT o IOT m and that's gonna be the first course off of that and people like it we have a lot of ideas for different mini courses and even some software that we want to build that that'll help people use virtual assistants so it's all around the idea of really helping people use virtual assistants and we really love the Philippines and VA s in the Philippines and we're even partnering with teach for the Philippines too which is all about providing Filipino children with more education to help them become virtual assistants or get jobs and other opportunities so it all kinda goes full circle and we feel like it's our way to really give back to the community sounds brilliant and also I really like the fact that you have based your sourcing of EA's just from one country what is your experience with fill opinion in terms of cultural differences yeah well the freedom marketplace so it was about 40 50 % Philippines so it wasn't all Philippines but we obviously like like the Philippines a lot and I have a great relationship with a lot of Filipino Virtual Assistants I mean they're hardworking they speak English at a high level they have a sense of family and team culture which i think is really important especially if you want to keep virtual assistants around for a long period of time after you invest all this time money and energy into them you want them to work for you for four years to come obviously price point as a factor minimum wage in the Philippines is $12 a day so it's not that hard to beat that and I NBA's that we were paying over 20 plus an hour and we increased their rate over time and when we sold free up we took hundreds of thousands of dollars and gave it to our team in the Philippines to thank them for all their hard work so just because you can hire them cheap doesn't mean you necessarily have to and now you can't treat them well but there's a lot of great cultural things like speak English and the fact that they're tech savvy and they consume that the same media that we do in terms of video games movies and music and stuff like that that helps you especially if you're a product based business hiring people that actually understand or potentially understand your products that's super important I'm talking about outsourcing how do you know what else outsource which parts of your business you can delegate to someone else safely in which parts you absolutely must yourself yeah so I like to focus on what I'm good at I think most entrepreneurs are only good at one two three things if you're an Amazon seller maybe you're good at writing listings maybe you're good at sourcing products but figure out what you're the best at and create a list of all the other stuff and how many hours a week you're spending on it and also you can order it by what you like doing the least versed the most but I tend to do it by how do I get the most time back okay if this task is taking me hours a week what would I do with an extra five hours how can I delegate that and I encouraged entrepreneurs to to create a 90-day rule where you're not doing any tasks outside of your core competency longer than 90 days for the first 90 days you're you're figuring it out you're throwing stuff against the wall for the second month maybe you're you have a good idea of what works and what doesn't work and you're fine-tuning that SOP and maybe you're hiring that VA and then you're spending the last month onboarding the VA and training them and getting them to really take over the task giving them feedback so that at the end of 90 days you're not doing that task anymore and if you can consistently do that over and over in your business you're gonna be able to really focus on the high level stuff right that's right and also one of the main ideas I had was to find something that is repetitive as long as it's also time-consuming if you see something repeating over and over again there must be some potential to like shape that and I like a procedure and just outsource it let it let someone else take care of that yes yeah repetitive is great and it's a perfect place to start especially if you've never hired a VA before I think as you get better and better at hiring bas you can give them more advanced tasks I'll give them ownership of hey you're in charge of the customer service team you're in charge of the billing team whatever applies for your business and you can have people prove themselves by giving them ownership of small tasks have them make those tasks better and better and eventually make them team leaders and who knows I some of my best ideas best feedback has come from VA s because I gave them more than just the repetitive tasks mm-hmm so it's not just tasks outsourcing but also giving them ownership over the parts that they're charged oh yeah exactly what are some of them immediate disqualifiers my candidate when you're doing like an interview something that will be immediately propulsive where you just know it's not gonna work the red flecks so what we preach is doing an interview via chat you can do it on skype you can do it on slack or Google Hangouts whatever you want to do and we actually are recording this week how to interview a VA and actually interviewing VA s for our course and the thing that is the biggest red flag for us is response to if we're asking question it's taking four minutes six minutes five minutes to get a response that's a huge red flag for us we want to work for someone who we can keep going and make progress and quickly get through an interview get through the onboarding and get them started because that only leads to delays down the line whether it's their internet or it's distractions or they're just a slow typer or whatever it is any of those things are big red flags another red flag for me is people people that their motivation isn't the actual work or isn't actually that the culture or being a part of the business people where their motivation is money how do I make more money and they're not a graphic designer because they love doing graphic design they're not a virtual assistant because they want to be a part of something great and grow with the business they really just care about money at the end of the day and the second someone offers them more money they're out the door so those are two that we kind of look for upfront but as you're going through the interview process different red flags will pop up and it's your job as a business owner to dig a little bit deeper let's say for example they they live in a rural area that has a lot of power into power areas well you need to dig deeper what's the back-up plan do they have a back-up generator do they have a friend's house they can go to so not every red flag as oh my god if I see this I can't hire this person sometimes using to dig more I dig deeper and get more information interesting and talking about the communication response times does the time difference show is a big problem so no at a time difference has never really been a problem because we know what we're looking for upfront if we need someone 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern Time we're only gonna hire someone that we know is good working 9:00 to 5:00 Easter time that is work the graveyard shift before if we're hiring someone flex schedule we have a set a meet-up point so hey your flex schedule I don't care when you do the work but check in mate with me every day at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time so there are ways to go around it well the way that I like to tell people is first of all make sure that the VA is really good with the schedule that might mean asking them two or three times and really making sure they're good with that and second avoid anything that's on call and urgent on : urgent doesn't exist having a VA that just sits at their computer waiting for send them work and they just get to it right away that might work for a day or maybe it's a new VA that is trying it out for the first time but that's not gonna last that's not a good way to run your business you either need some kind of set schedule and you do a project based by milestones or you can do flexible schedule but with check-in points if you have on-call work and I have a lot of uncalled the ace for different things I reach out to them and I say hey are you available and if they are then we set up a due date so really on-call is project basis it's never on call and urgent right so talking about those expectations how do you set expectations in terms of deliverables what time or due dates like you mentioned yeah so I always like to set not only a due date but a due time as well it's not due next Tuesday it's due next Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time and you can set in milestones even if it's a small project let's say it's a four day project that you're having them do you can say hey at the end of the second day send me what you have so far so that I can give you feedback so I can point you back in the right direction so setting up that due date due time and those milestones those check-in points incredibly important and start small and get bigger let's say you have a virtual assistant that needs to optimize 50 Amazon listings don't just give them 50 listings give them one have them send it back to you give them feedback give them two more have them send it back to you and then build up from there and what happens is if you do it small and work your way up you end up building a rolodex of EA's and freelancers that you can rely on that you don't have to do that in the future you can say hey I'm gonna send this to Bob he's good at listings I'm gonna send this to the Joe he's good at graphic design and you know what you're gonna get exactly um in terms of time deliverables how do you react if a virtual assistant is a little slower than what was expected or you know is realistic in terms of yeah so for me it's all about communication and I was going through this with these video editors I had just hired the four-hour course and they they're they've been doing an awesome job but that first day I was like hey give me an estimate let's say you take 4 hours if it's gonna take you more than four hours that's fine but don't tell me at the end that oh my god I just used up the four hours I need two more if you get to our two or our three and you think it's gonna take you more time communicate it then and then we can make a decision from there and obviously if if someone's really really slow you can always make a move and get someone faster but what I like to do is break it down and find out what is the cause of you being slow is that your internet is a computer or usually if you break it down it's one particular thing one step that they're being held up on and human s Opia a standard operating procedure that's five steps long I'll go through it and I'll say hey how long is step one taking how long is step to taking how long is step three taking and let's say they say oh step three is taking me an hour and a half and in my head I'm thinking what that it's a twenty minute task they don't go even deeper into step three all right walk me through why it's taking so long and maybe it's one or two things that they're not understanding or they're not doing it the right way or you have a faster way that you can teach them and that's usually a much better way to get someone to work faster so the key would be frequent and quality high quality communication and having your SOPs in place yeah and being able to break it down deeper than oh my VA slow figure out where what part of the SOP they're actually slow at yeah that might even lead you to some good conclusions that will improve your SOPs as well absolutely okay in terms of price per hour for example how do you determine how much how do you negotiate the prices and what are some of the flaws of hiring some some of the most pink cheapest workers so a typical VA in the Philippines I recommend paying between five and ten bucks an hour and the real key for me is if I'm gonna hire someone let's say my budgets five bucks an hour I want to make sure the person I'm hiring wants to work at five bucks an hour if they really want six that's fine I'll go find someone else I want five now you can lowball you can negotiate but there's some risk involved and I do it because I'm a little bit more advanced I've hired a lot of EA's and I usually maybe I'll start with the trial period okay you want five for the first 30 days you'll do it at four and then we'll bump you up to five or what I did with Marius at free up is he wanted five I said hey let's start you off at three but I'm gonna increase your rate every time build ours goes up by 500 so I eventually made him a team leader and his pay went up and he eventually was making over $15.00 an hour so there's different creative ways you can go about starting off at a low rate you just have to be okay with the risk that hiring Marius for three bucks an hour that could have backfired on me right he could have reckon quit after a week because someone else offered him more money and I have to be okay with that risk so if you want to play that the safe bet make sure you hire people that are happy with the rate that you're willing to offer and if you do lowball or you do offer a training period or you do offer hey I'm gonna give you a raise in six months make sure that you honor your word and now you're actually doing those things or the chance of losing them goes up even higher mm-hmm aside from losing them are there any other risks that are involved in keeping hiring the cheapest workers yeah I mean it depends you hire more than how you pay them I've hired cheap people that have been great and I told them for example hey I have a lead generation task it's a flexible schedule it's really low stress I'm gonna teach you how to do it it's really easy I'm not gonna give you additional tasks and but this is the rate and the rate is not gonna go up and is that what you're looking for are you okay with that and I spent a little extra time making sure that they were okay with that and that was perfect I've had other people that I hired for a low rate and and they really weren't skilled enough to even do that task so I think it has more to do with their experience and why they they're okay with such a low rate maybe they're good with the outside stuff the flexibility the ability to work from home that that the easiness of the job so that they don't have to stress out and they can focus on their family whatever it is or it could be that there are a new virtual assistant and this is an entry rate and they're gonna be looking to increase their rates later which could lead to turnover so you really need to get the full picture of hey this person is OK at 4 bucks an hour but do they just need a job right now or they okay really okay with 4 bucks an hour long-term which leads us back to communication you have to communicate those things really really well and like going to all these details can you tell us a bit more about diversification of your own line workers what does it mean why is it so important and how to do it yeah so I had a situation with my Amazon business where I hired one person to be the manager the day I taught him how to list products how to do customer service how to do repricing this was before Amazon software even existed so it was very very manual and on the flip side I had this one manufacturer who I was crushing it with and I said you know what I don't care about the other manufacturers let's focus on them so I get my business to a really good place I think its money's coming in I have one person running everything I'm sleeping better at night I'm not as stressed out I got this one manufacturer we're crushing it with them making good margins and I go on vacation and on the first day of my vacation my manager quits on me and my manufacturer drops me so I learned a very valuable lesson about diversification and when I came back I started contacting lots of different manufacturers and built relationships with hundreds of them and it wouldn't be the last manufacturer that dropped me but the next time it wasn't that big of a deal and when it became time to hire again I diversify dit and divided up between teams or departments so I hired two VA s for customer service one person for listing prices or for listing products want to people for repricing and next time someone quit on me it wasn't that big of a deal I would just plug someone into that specific team it would only take me a few hours or days or weeks to train them instead of six months and it's a much better way to run your business and I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into this trap where hirings hard you make a few bad hires you finally hire someone you like and then you just load that person up with everything because you really like working with them and people don't realize how risky that really makes your business all right putting all ants in one basket so when it comes to building a team culture with the online workers for their remotes team how do you go about that and how do you find out what you are online workers care most about so we call it our barf method which is kind of a funny acronym but it stands for getting them to buy in showing appreciation building relationships and creating a family culture so getting them to buy in is stuff like telling them why you started the business what's your motivation behind it how hard did you work to create it how what the work that they're doing how that actually contributes the big picture so making them feel a part of the business showing appreciation is super easy thanking them for a hard day's work or a great week at the end of the week or when you accomplish something a project is done telling them what a great job they did building relationship is more one-on-one getting to know that I'm sharing about you the food you like how you travel you can visit them in person if you want to go to the extreme but you can just learn about them their family their personal life a little bit outside of work and building the family is getting everyone on your team to like each other and want to hang out together and and we've sponsored meetups and different events there but you can also do it during your meetings ask people to share stuff for their meetings about them and build those relationships because if people feel like your business is their family they're gonna be less likely to leave even if they get a higher paying job offer so if you can get people to buy in if you show appreciation if you build relationships and you build that family the percentage of turnover drastically goes down and you're gonna build a really good culture that's really great especially if you have people that you really care about leaving in your team that's you long long term so one part of that communication of understanding what it really matters to them is getting their ideas and feedback from them so you have any advice the best practices do that yeah so sometimes few people in the Philippines can be a little bit shy I need you to ask people questions more than once so we'll tell them that during the interview will tell them that during the onboarding and we'll make it clear during meetings well we'll ask for feedback now when you do ask for feedback you're gonna get good ideas you're gonna get bad ideas you're gonna get some ideas that they might make sense to the VA but the VA doesn't have the full picture to know why that would or would work so you have to be very careful on how you accept the feedback if you say we love feedback we love feedback we love feedback and someone gives you feedback and you shoot it down right away they're probably not gonna give you more feedback so it's a full process it takes a little bit convincing it takes a little bit of making them feel comfortable like no idea is a bad idea and you want their feedback and ideas and sometimes you have to go the extra effort and say hey that seems like a really good idea let me explain to you why I don't think that'll work and then you can let me know what you think once you have the full information so it's a long-term play it's not a short-term play and I also like to tell people hey you don't have to come in and give me feedback and ideas on day one learn what we have so far the SOPs I teach you isn't that way because Nate said so it's that way because this is what we've built so far we're on the same side now let's make it better let's try to improve everything and keep getting better over time and when you set that mentality over all over when you said the mentality and tality early on and you continue to do it over and over and over again you're going to get vaz feel comfortable with you that continue to send you really good feedback interesting um so keeping that in mind that you have to build those SOPs that's like number one important thing you really need to understand your processes and your procedures and everything and break it break it down into details so that being said they have like some really good advice on how to build those and because I know for sure that you shouldn't let at least you shouldn't let even one day go by without building assets for your business so SOPs are one big part of those assets so what can you share with us regarding SOPs yeah and I think that's one of the things that made free up acquirable because when they were going through their due diligence the Hoth who bought us they were asking hey what's your process for this what's your process for this and we had everything documented very clear where someone who maybe didn't understand that the business could understand how to do it so I like to break SOPs into three parts now everyone knows the middle part right it's the steps do step one step two step three step four that parts are given two parts that people sup are the top and the bottom the top you have to give a background you have to give a why you can give a background on your business and give a background on the task why they're doing the task what success what failure looks like I'll even put in mariusz for example my bookkeeper I had fired the two bookkeepers before him so I put in there not their name is when I said hey the two bookkeepers before you didn't work out because of XYZ this is what I'm looking for so before even got to the steps he got to see what the business was why he why bookkeeping and billing is so important and what I'm looking for what success and what's failure that he went through the steps and then the bottom I put in the really important things it could be hey don't email seller support or seller performance for any reason without my approval it could be hey if my lawyer accountant shoots me an email make sure you tell me don't respond to that but don't have the important parts just buried in your steps have a little reminder at the bottom of all the really important things that they should or should not do so if you break down your SOPs like that the why the steps that do not do list you're gonna be a much better success rate getting people to really understand your trainings interesting a lot of fun trip Renault's don't find that super important because they have a lot of things on their plate but once you also stop you'll get your focus to the right in the right place and start building those assets which is super important alright thank you for being our guest on our podcast today you have anything else like a tough one advice related to outsourcing that you'd like to share with our listeners yeah don't give up I mean no one has a 100% hiring record that the key is to figure out a way to get into that 70 to 90 percent where 70 to 90% of your hires are a plus players with really the good culture that help your business and entrepreneurs that are just stuck in that twenty to forty percent they're gonna struggle they're gonna go in circles and anything you can do to improve your hiring process is can I help you we also have a free VA calculator if you go to outsource cool calm /v a calculator which will tell you you'll plug in information on your business how many full-time and part-time virtual assistants you can afford which will give you a really good parameters on what you can hire and what you can really take off your plate one last question um do you have any book recommendations for business owners yeah check out hatching Twitter I actually just finished that book fantastic book you kind of get a behind the scenes of the good the bad and the ugly when it comes to growing a business from an idea to an IPO and it's just fascinating for people starting off at friends as friends and and really backstabbing each other and it's a big power grab so very fascinating book for anyone that loves entrepreneurship thank you very much Satan for being my guest today yeah thanks for having me