Hi, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com and welcome to the dedicated channel where I help you with outsourcing, automation and creating the lifestyle that you desire. In today’s video, I want to give you 5 top tips that I recommend to help you with outsourcing and these 5 tips are very simple, practical tips that you can take. All right, let’s just jump straight into it.

The first tip is that I want to share with you is just make sure that 1, you defined exactly what you want to do and what you what this outsourcing person to do for you. That’s what you need to really sit down and think about. A lot of times, when I speak to people they go I need to find someone full-time to work for me. And I go oh, what do you need to be done? Then they go oh, I need to do WordPress installations, I need them to check my emails, I need to do all that kind of stuff. But that’s not really defined, that’s actually just generally everything that you need to be done. What I recommend you do is to breakdown each individual process and have a look at it. If you need someone to do programming for you, find a programmer. If you need to do just administration, find someone who’s a virtual assistant. So just really define specifically what tasks that you need to be done. Then that way from there onwards, you need to just figure out whether or not it needs to be outsourced or can it be automated with a system or something that’s in place that doesn’t require any additional payments or income out of your business. All right, so that’s the first point.

Second point I highly recommend is obviously once you defined what you want to do, go out and find the right people to be able to outsource to. And, a lot of times I see a lot of people who jump over to eLance, oDesk, Rentacoder and all those large websites. Nothing wrong with that if you are looking for contractors just to do one-off jobs. But in my opinion, I highly, highly recommend you look for people who work full-time or part-time for your business. The reason why I recommend that is because 1, once you teach them and train them with the right skills, they’re going to be there for a while and they’re not going to run away or do something else, you know work for someone else’s business. I recommend doing that because you basically retain their skills because you don’t want to spend all the time training them, giving them all the systems, giving them all the tools that they need to be able to setup whatever you need them to do and then suddenly the job’s finished, they runoff or they take off or finish that. And that’s what happens with most contractors whereas when you have someone full-time, they’ll just complete the work and continue to work with you, and get to know your systems and really commit to your business and even back you up whenever there’s downtime from you. So that’s the second point I highly recommend is just to make sure you look for full timers or part timers. There’s plenty of websites I also recommend on my blog as well, too that shows you where to find them.

Now the third point I want to share with you is to make sure that once you’ve got these people in your business, make sure you have plenty of good training and spend at least, at least a good fair amount of time. Usually, for people who are starting out I recommend spending at least a good month to provide them with all the systems, the training, and making sure that they’re feeling comfortable knowing your whole business because ultimately, you’re investing the time you’re putting into them for your business. They’re an asset to your business so I highly, highly recommend you train them and spend good fair amount of time. A lot of people I see unfortunately, they hire someone and expect them to just takeover and run the business straightaway. It doesn’t happen like that, you need to invest your time to train them. So that’s the third point I recommend.

Now the fourth point is make sure you have a good, good system in place. What I mean by that is to have a project management system that manages each and everyone of your employees even if you’re starting with one of them or your virtual staff but make sure you have everything centralized and put into one system. The reason why I recommend that is because once you have the people and all your resources all located in one system, everyone can access that at a central location not having to flick back through emails, looking through data trying to find things, not going to find documentation, all that kind of thing. If you have one project management system setup, you have all your usernames and details logged in there. You have all your training videos put inside, you keep all your projects managed there. It’s all in that one place and it just makes life so much easier and furthermore once they’re working for you full-time and commit to your business, they just use that system and they don’t even have to talk to you. All you need to do is log in and see what they’re doing. So it’s a really, really good way to keep track on what’s going on and keep your projects running day to day. So that’s my fourth point there.

Finally, my fifth point is just to make sure that you pay them. Pay them, pay them, pay them on time. I know I’m emphasizing this quite heavily but if I were in this position of actually working for someone and I sent my invoice over them and it took them one month to pay the invoice, I wouldn’t be working with them. So if you can and ensure you need to, just pay them on time. So if they sent an invoice, just pay them straightaway. Don’t delay, don’t put it off, just pay them on time and make sure things go smoothly. And that way they know that they’re secure in the job that they’re working for you but also too, they’re going to be able to be rewarded as well for their work because once you’ve done all that work, you want to get paid. So that’s something I highly, highly recommend. That’s the fifth point, the most important point I think out of all these you can take away.

All right, I hope that these outsourcing little tips that you’ve taken, the 5 tips that I recommend today are going to be useful and practical and if you can, just take away and start implementing them if you are looking for that position to outsource right now.

If you want to any more information about how to outsource, simply you can subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll give you 10 free videos on how to outsource step by step. I don’t hold anything there. So just check it out, it’s at MassOutsource.com sign up there and you’ll get 10 free videos directly from me. Furtheremore, I love to hear your feedback and your comments, just simply leave them right down below and share with everyone what your thoughts and if you’ve got any additional comments and feedback from this video as well.

All right, thanks very much today for watching this. My name is Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye for now.

Hi, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com and welcome to dedicated channel where I help you with outsourcing, automation and also designing the lifestyle that you desire. I wanted to share with you something really exciting that Gideon Shalwick and myself is currently doing. In the next week or so, we’ll be presenting a webinar on how to outsource video creation.

Now, I’ve talked a lot about how to outsource video creation and also how I got through his process of Rapid Video Blogging. What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be coming together and we’re going to be presenting in a live webinar with a Q&A session and also looking at answering all of your questions and presenting to you a really cutting edge type of technology that we put together that will help you outsource all the way to anyone that you want around the world and do it all from home without you having to send over any files or anything overseas. It’s really exciting because it’s not seen anywhere else.

What I want to do is invite you to take a look. All you have to do is just click on the link that’s right below here and it’ll take you to have a look at the presentation that Gideon is going to be presenting as well. Watch the video, it’s only a very, very short video and if this webinar really, really suits you and fits with what you want to do then I highly, highly recommend you participating and also joining in.

Now, if you decide to take on and also participate in the webinar which is happening next week, I’m going to give you a really, really cool bonus that I’m going to include in this. And, this cool bonus is actually going to help you speed up the things even faster. What I’m going to do is if you decide to participate in this webinar, I’m going to provide you with training videos which you can give straight to the person that you’re planning to use to do the video for you, or video editing, or video promoting, etc. and these videos are going to save you amount of time having to train your virtual staff. And, this pack that I’m going to give you is valued at $97 as well and I’m going to give that you as a bonus if you decide to participate in this webinar.

All right so that’s just something really special and I love to have you on the call because I’ll be able to interact with you. If you’ve got questions and answers, you can always ask me on those calls as well, too. And, I think that with this particular webinar that’s going to be hosted by both of us, it’s going to bring out a lot of interesting and amazing tools and also key concepts that you can do to really, really speed up your process of video blogging.

All right so love to see you there. If you can’t make it for any reason, you can always download the webinar once it’s finished as well and that’s what we’re going to be doing for recording this. And furthermore, down below here you can also leave your feedback and also the questions you want to ask inside the webinar. So I highly, highly recommend you just click on that link that’s just below here and check it out and find out if it’s something for you all right?

If you’ve got any further questions, just feel free to leave your comments below but just click on that link right below me right now, and check it out. So I’ll talk to you soon and have a great day. Bye for now.

Tyrone: Hi everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. Today I’ve got a special guest here on the call with me. You’ve probably already seen previously I’ve interviewed Chris Ducker before and I just wanted to get Chris on the line today because I want to share with you something really, really exciting and something that I’ve used as a service as well, too. So, I probably should introduce Chris first. How are you going Chris?

Chris: Very, very good. How about yourself?

Tyrone: Good, good buddy. Well the reason why I got Chris on the call today was I’ve been talking to Chris quite a bit and just from personal experience, I believe that Chris has one of the best places to find people to outsource virtual assistants and anything that you need in terms in the Philippines because being over in the Philippines where Chris is right now, is a huge, huge opportunity for him to be able to find good, quality stuff for you. So I thought okay, Chris’s got a new service that’s come out called Virtual Staff Finder and I thought why not get Chris on the line to share a little bit more information about this service. A service that I’ve used already and I found exceptional and something that I can highly, highly recommend. So Chris, maybe just share with us why you started this service and also little bit more about how it works?

Chris: Okay, well ahh…the reason why I set this thing up more than anything else, had to think of that for a minute…

Tyrone: I think I realized that.

Chris: The reason why I set it up more than anything else is because as my own outsourcing company Live2Sell Group has grown over the 5 years being in the business, our own sort of business strategies have changed a little bit. We no longer work with very small companies or entrepreneurs. We tend to sort of focus on partnering up with medium to large sized companies nowadays. And that’s just…you know, that’s just a strategy thing. It’s not because we don’t like the little businesseses, or you know the moutain top places or things like that. Fact to the matter is that you know, for every company as it grows, things change, strategies change. We would know different. And, I mean as an entrepreneur myself, I really…did miss. I’m talking about really for the last year or so. We haven’t worked with any sort of entrepreneurs or small companies. I’ve really been missing those one on one collaborations and those conversations, you know brainstorming and mind mapping sessions and things like that. And, it just became very, very evident to me from talking to people like yourself who are obviously involved with the outsourcing industry online and also with the clients coming through to…to our website, the Live2Sell website that there’s a massive, massive gap in the market for people who wanted to work with homebased virtual assistants but perhaps maybe didn’t want to spend the time and the effort, and the certain amount of money to go through all the process of trying to find somebody. And then, have possibly the risk in wasting a lot of time and money by choosing the wrong people. And, I think there’s a lot of horror stories online by using all these job websites which I’m not going to mention because I only get in trouble with them. But, the fact to the matter is that there’s a lot of horror stories where you pay people and they disappear on you, all those sorts of stuff. For me that’s…it’s just not fair for the entrepreneur. So, we set it up to bridge that gap fundamentally, that’s the tagline of the services: to bridge the outsourcing gap between working with a homebased virtual assistant and having the backbone and the infrastructure in terms of the interviewing, and background checking, and betting and testing that we have with Live2Sell Group that we use ourselves internally when we’re hiring people for our company. We have over 220 people working for us now so it’s tried and tested, it really does work.

Tyrone: Awesome. Well, the thing is probably just to mention as well, I’ve worked with quite a lot of students and members within Mass Outsource and also I still get a lot of people inquiring through my blog as well and through the MassOutsource.com, “Tyrone, I can’t find anyone who’s suitable. I’ve been through the job websites that you’ve recommended…” and I’m not saying that those job websites are probably going to be the best or not any good or anything like that but it’s a struggle because sometimes, to deal with them to find the right quality people does take time. So what Chris is able to do with this service and the reason why I find some awesome service and it worked really, really well is that it saves you time. It saves you huge amount of time having to go out there and find it yourself, do the interview process, back and forth testing and so forth. What Chris can do for you is really streamline that time and interview them for you, make sure the processes are all correct in place and basically hand you through that silver platter. And, you get basically the right candidate and saves you so much time having to spend looking for them. And, I’ll give you an example because I have used his service already. He was actually able to…I actually contacted Chris and I said, “Look Chris, I’m struggling to find a good, quality programmer out there specifically for PHP. And, because of that I just said look, I’ve been looking through so many different qualifications try out this website, try that website and just couldn’t find the right one. I said Chris can you see for me, since you’re in the Philippines, anyone that’s local around your area to be able to come and get interviewed and potentially be a candidate for my company.” So he went out there within probably a couple of days, came back with an awesome response and since then, I hired him. He’s been on my team for…I don’t know how long now but he’s just been an awesome, awesome programmer. So thank you, thank you to Chris that if I didn’t actually ask him, I wouldn’t have him on board. So I can tell you, just from personal experience, the service that Chris provides is just tremendous value because the kind of things that he can do for you not only can he find good candidates but he’ll also give you that personalized service to find out exactly what you want and this is just a testimonial for Chris’s service called the Virtual Staff Finder which I think in my opinion is probably one of the best resources to help find virtual assistants and virtual staff all across from the Philippines. So yeah…

Chris: I think it’s…I’d like to just add one thing as well. I think this will put a lot in people’s mind that these are as well, I actually now put together a team. When we were working with you actually, it’s just myself and my assistant that’s just working with people locally to find, I believe it was Joseph right? That’s the name of the programmer we’ve found you. And he actually is based here in Cebu and he came into the office, I’ve met him very briefly and he chatted with a couple of staff and everything but obviously not all the virtual assistants that we help entrepreneurs find and start to work with are based here in Cebu. You know, a lot of them are in Manila and that’s hours and airplane away. So what I’ve eventually done, I’ve set up a team three girls now, that consistently work not only with the clients, the entrepreneurs hiring for the service but also for the virtual assistants as well. And this is the very important part, we pre-programm their mindset on the types of things like when they should get paid, how they should get paid, how much they should get paid, the type of work that they’ll be doing for their virtual bosses, how to work with their virtual bosses and things like that. Not only as…I don’t actually do that myself. I have Filipinos in their local time, in their local dialect when there’s no…you know there’s absolutely no barriers, you know what they’re saying is getting across to them perfectly, there’s no communication barriers or problems in any way whatsoever. And so far, we’ve placed about in work. We launched the service a week ago and last week we’ve had close to 20 people signed up for it and I think we’ve already placed about 7 or 8 virtual assistants and so far the response have just been phenomenal. People were just like “Wow, they really know what they’ll be doing for me.” And that is you know, of the back as well as number one, finding somebody then number two, finding someone that’s actually going to know what you want me to do for you on a day to day basis. And, part of the process for the entrepreneur or the virtual boss to actually put together a very good quality job description as well so we can find the right candidate in that place as well. It’s not just about pretty good job ad on a website, we want to know exactly what your virtual staff member is going to be doing on a day to day basis so that we can find absolute best candidate for that as well.

Tyrone: Absolutely and that’s the reason why I say it to a lot of people and I always refer a lot of people back to you Chris because the fact is a lot of them just come back to me and say…and say to me…

Chris: I should thank you for that. You’re right. No, I’ve had a ton of sign ups for you, a ton! And not just for Virtual Staff Finder but also for Live2Sell Group as well a few full time you know, solution provider VAs as well. So thank you very, very much.

Tyrone: You’re welcome anytime because if you can look after my clients, if it makes them happy, it makes me happy too. So…but in all that I’ve seen is that the thing that is so important is finding the right quality candidate is not easy and I know that it’s hard because I’ve been through that myself and I’ve filtered through hundreds and hundreds of candidates and sometimes you just get frustrated. It’s probably better to have somebody who’s physically there and has a team back and behind you to actually go through that process which in the end if you spend a whole week trying to find somebody and Chris does it in a couple of hours for you, you can imagine the cost saving you can gain back from that. So I definitely recommend, I highly, highly recommend checking out the Virtual Staff Finder. If you do want to find out more about Chris’s service, just simply shoot him an email which I’ll put a link right down below here and you can contact him anytime. He’s a friendly guy, so don’t be afraid of him. And if there’s any further questions that you want to ask me as well just feel free to shoot it through. But I hope that you take this service on and have a look at it and consider it if you are looking for a virtual staff right now because it’s an awesome service. Anything else you want to add Chris as well, too?

Chris: No. Not at all, except for the fact that you’re very kind gentleman for that very nice testimonial, thank you very much.

Tyrone: You’re welcome. You can use it anyway you want to. So yeah, if you guys want to check it out, just simply click on the link that’s right below in this video as well, too. And, I’m pretty sure that Chris will look after you straightaway too.

Chris: Sure I will. Your promise made, it was my pleasure.

Tyrone: You’re welcome. Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming onto the call and sharing with our audience and also I hope that for people who’ve seen this will benefit from this as well and hope to see you soon as well. So we’ll catch up as well after this.

Chris: You got it, absolutely.

Tyrone: Awesome. Have a good one!

Chris: You too mate!

Tyrone: Bye for now.

Hey everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. Thanks very much for visiting this video today. I want to share with you something that a lot of people particularly my coaching students and subscribers have been asking me is how do I manage all my virtual staff and all the team together, not having to spend so much time checking back and forth and managing the projects.

Well, what I would suggest highly is to create or to buy a system such as project management system to put into place. One that I’ve been using very successfully is called ActiveCollab. ActiveCollab is not that expensive to buy, you can actually buy it outright for around $400 US. Once you set that system up, you can basically be able to access and transfer all the details and manage your day-to-day projects all in one place. Another system that you can use as well is called BasecampHQ and a lot of marketers out there also recommend it too, it’s very simple to use.

So, that’s what I recommend doing — to use a project management system. Inside the project management system, you can manage everything from your projects, staff, communication, etc. It’s simply having a backlog that’s loaded up into there. The great thing about running in a project management system is you can track what’s going on. That’s what I love — I’ll just have to hop into the system and see how progress is working on this project, what’s happening with this project, and so forth. That’s a great way doing it.

One other thing I want to mention as well is keeping track of all passwords and usernames can be a hassle so what I also recommend doing is setting up an account in this system called Lastpass.com. What you can do from there is setup all your passwords inside this little system which is free, and have it linked out to your project management system so that if any of your virtual staff or team members needs to access your usernames or passwords for certain projects, they can easily use this system, log it in and once they’ve put it straight up, they’ll have complete access to anything that they need to do.

So those are two things that I want to clear up with people — as I said, these 2 pieces of software that I highly recommend is ActiveCollab which you can just buy outright or setup for yourself which is a project management system, or BasecampHQ which is an online system which you just have to pay monthly fee and everything runs online there for you.

I hope you enjoyed that little tip and if you have any more questions, I’d love to hear from your feedbacks and your comments just right below down here. I’d love to hear any further interesting topics that you might want me to talk about and share with you as well. Have a great day and I’ll see you in the next video!

Hey everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. A question I get asked a lot is how do I train my virtual staff? So today, I’m going to share with you a step by step process in how to train your virtual staff.

So you found your virtual staff and you’re ready to move on and ready to get them start working for you full time or even if they’re not working for you full time, part time is fine. Let’s start with the first thing. The first thing is to talk a little bit more about what you need to do to be able to prepare them so that they can know exactly what they need to do. The first point I want to note to you is train them only one thing first. Start them off with one main task.

Let’s say for example, if you want them to run a whole new campaign for Adwords or you want them to setup a website for you, which is just one project or one task. You train them up so that they familiarize themselves and get really good at this one task. What I usually do is before I get them to start on a project is I actually sit down, and I open up my mind mapping software. The software that I use to be able to generate a mind map is called Freemind. You can download Freemind if you’ll just run it on a Google search on the Internet.

It’s basically a mind mapping software which allows you to be able to layout step by step the path and the process or the screenflow on how you go about getting the project done. If you just want to break down all the information, that’s a great way to do it and use Freemind to do that. Now, if you want more of a structure where you just go step by step showing them a flowchart for example, there’s really good software that I also use called Gliffy. You can download it or use it in Gliffy.com and that allows you to be able to draw arrows and boxes to be able to do a nice little flowchart of what you need to be done.

So those are the two pieces of software that I usually use. I start off with Freemind first, downpour my information and ideas onto the computer, see what it’s going to head and exactly what I want to do. Then, I jump straight in Gliffy and do a flowchart of exactly where the tasks of how the processes work. What I’ll do is I take my flowchart and I’ll put together a step by step instruction of how to complete the task and I start to generate the videos. The way I generate those videos is either sit in front of camera like what I’m doing like now or to turn on my computer where I have a little webcam and talk in front of the camera, I can do that. Or, if there’s a very technical side of things, I turn on my little software called Jing. Jing project is a free software made by TechSmith which you can download from Jingproject.com.

That basically captures five minutes of what you’re doing on screen. That way, you can easily show to your virtual staff or virtual assistant exactly step by step what needs to be done and how to go about approaching it. So, that’s what I do. I create those videos and once I’ve created those videos, I’ll upload it to the project management system. Once that’s done, I’ll send it straight over to my virtual staff and I say, start from steps 1 to 5 and just learn doing the steps and once you’ve done that, start doing the work for me. That’s how I go about training my virtual staff.

It’s not anything that’s really difficult, it just takes a bit of time. But the best thing I can recommend you to do is to take some time out and just set these training videos out because once you set them out once, they’re there forever. It’ll save you amount of ample time because once you train up your virtual staff, they can train the new virtual staff that you hire later on by just giving these same videos to them and they’ll be able to add tips, points, etc to it. One last thing I want to mention as well to you is make sure you get your virtual staff or virtual assistant to document everything that they do so if they implemented a new process, or added some new tips or ideas on how to make this process better, get them to document it for you and upload it to project management system. That way, they can always refer back to it.

That’s pretty much on how you go about doing that. Hopefully, that little tip can help you save amount of time in training your virtual staff because that’s something I find quite turning point for a lot of people because I find that it’s what holds them back from taking that next step to free themselves up to do the things that they need to do. If you haven’t trained the virtual staff, they would still run back and forth trying to get them to do the same things over and over again.

That’s pretty much what I do and I’d love to hear some more of your feedbacks and comments. Just put them right below at my blog or if you’re watching this on Youtube, just visit my blog at Tyroneshum.com. So, I’ll see you in the next video, it’s Tyrone Shum from Tyroneshum.com. I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye for now!

Hi everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com! I want to share with you today a really, really common question I get all the time. This is usually for the newbies who are just starting to outsource. As like me, I’ve been through and when I first started looking at outsourcing my business, outsourcing all my tasks and get people to do the work, I go “Who shall I outsource first to?”, “Where should I find the first person?” I want to answer those questions who should you hire first or who should you outsource to first and there’s many ways or options to go about this but I’m giving you just two simple options.

The first thing is I would firstly look for someone to work for you full time. Don’t hire any contractors, don’t hire anyone who’s just going to be here and be just doing one of the tasks because once you spend time training them, you’re going to lose those skills. That’s the first thing, hire someone for full time. If you can’t afford someone on full time, go for someone who’s part time because when you hire someone part time, at least they’re going to be working for you minimum 20 hours a week.

If you hire someone full time, it’s 40 hours a week and they’re going to be managing whole business for you or managing a lot of your tasks that you’re currently doing yourself. The mindset to have is not to think “Okay, because I’m going to offload say 40 hours of my work, I’m going to do twice as much work.” Yes, in many ways you can think that might work at first but what you’re trying to do is actually cut down your hours so you’re probably working at most 2-3 hours a day and for your staff to be working for you 40+ hours a week.

So that’s the first tip, to hire someone full time. The second thing that I recommend you do is to hire someone specifically for a skill. Now, every single person out there that you’re probably looking for has different skills. They could be focused on for example being a virtual assistant, being a programmer, a writer, and so forth. I don’t recommend hiring someone that’s going to be overall because you’re not going to be able to find that person.

You can’t find someone who’s going to be doing all your administration, transcripts, writing your posts and doing programming at the same time. That person doesn’t exist because that person is basically going to be you. So I recommend if you want to get someone who’s just going to start your administration work such as posting your blog posts onto your blog, handling your emails, just general overview of handling all the day-to-day tasks that’s very monotonous, hire a virtual assistant.

That’s what I did from my experience. My first virtual assistant I hired was from India. That experience wasn’t very good for me and I’ve learned from those experiences because I realized that it’s a culture breakdown. I’m not going to go to the story about what happened there in terms of my experience with hiring a virtual assistant from India but since I found someone from the Philippines, I had an absolutely amazing time with them. They’ve been stuck with me for as long as I’ve been running my business so I’ve been very, very happy and exceptionally proud with what they’ve done. The kind of work they’ve put in and loyalty they’ve had with me has been of high value.

If you want to have those kinds of things or offload those things, I firstly recommend hiring a virtual assistant. I’ll give you just a quick way to be able to let go of all the day-to-day things that are probably taking lot of your time and no doubt you might be thinking blog posting might not just take me half an hour just to put it up myself or to render a video, putting a video online for me might take 10, 15 minutes or so. Well, you add that all up and you’ll have multiple things to do and it adds up to your time. You should be spending a lot of time that you have to be focusing on dollar productive activities such as building relationships with leading people that will be able to help you refer business or you might be spending more time marketing and advertising your business to get more leads to come through.

Those are the things that you might probably want to consider. You can eventually outsource all these things as well but if you’re just starting out like how I was, your virtual assistant would help you there. That’s just something where I’ll go and as soon as you build your team and you’ve trained the first one and you get that person to train the second person and so forth then you start to develop a team that you can rely on and outsource all your work to.

That’s what I would recommend doing and hopefully, that answers the questions that a lot of people been asking me. I hope to see you in the next video. This is it for me today, and if you’ve got feedback or comments, I love to hear them so simply put your details down below and leave a feedback and comment of what you think about this video and any other questions that you might have as well. I’ll speak to you soon. It’s Tyrone Shum from Tyroneshum.com, I’ll see you in the next video.

Hi Tyrone Shum, from Tyroneshum.com. I keep getting a lot of questions from people asking me where I find really good virtual staff. A lot of people ask why not Elance, Scriptlance, or any of those. Well, the reason why I don’t choose those sites is because a lot of them are contractors that are actually going to apply and trying to get work there. Now, if you’re look for people, very high quality people to work for you full time and to get really good rates, I recommend sourcing people directly from the Philippines. What I’ve done very successfully is to be able to find people at a job website called Bestjobs.ph.

Bestjobs.ph is not a website that is accessible by anyone around the world. What happened is that Bestjobs.ph has restricted access to people only in the Philippines so in order to be able to get access to that website, you’ll need to have an account that is registered inside the Philippines and also, it has to be a registered account with a Filipino. Now, what I’ve done is because my virtual staff works inside the Philippines, I’m able to get access through their account so that we can share that through. If you’re a member of Mass Outsource Mastermind, you already have access to Bestjobs.ph and we stream all the resumes directly through so you can use it.

But if you want to just get access without joining Mass Outsource Mastermind program, I can give you access for a monthly fee if you choose to use it. All you have to do is simply click on the link right below here to be able to get access to Bestjobs.ph website and I’ll give you instructions on what to do with that. Basically, that’s just one website that you can find highly qualified people to get work done for you.

Second one that I recommend for you is oDesk.com. oDesk.com is really good website that I’ve been able to target only people from the Philippines to find great, high quality full time workers that work for me. So those are the two websites and oDesk as well is free so the only thing is you’ll be trying to get through all the clutter or trying to get through to find contractors to be able to do work for you. That’s why I recommend trying out Bestjobs.ph or trying to find a direct website inside the Philippines that hosts or has lots of resumes directly from Filipinos.

Well, if you want to find out more information from me, just simply check out my blog at Tyroneshum.com and I hope to see you soon. Have a great day!

Hi, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. Today, I want to share with you what is outsourcing and how can outsourcing benefit for you if you are deciding to do outsourcing. Now, I’ve had a lot of people who have come to me who are beginners in outsourcing and the reason why they’ve come up to my blog or reading up my information is because they’re trying to find out what can I do to outsource their business to be able to leverage their time and also to get back more things, more resources, tasks and work done. So let me explain to you firstly what is outsourcing. Outsourcing is another term for Business Process Outsourcing — that’s another long term to describe it but in simplistic terms, what outsourcing is to be able to hire someone, an individual or a company to be able to complete the work that you don’t want to do or some work that you can’t do yourself. Let’s just give you an example.

For example, if you want to develop a website and you’ve got absolutely no skills but you don’t want to hire someone locally to do it for you in terms of actually the costs, then you probably might want to find someone overseas such as in China, India, or Philippines to get the website done for you. That’s basically outsourcing your work to get done. It’s been talked about hotly and there have been a lot of launches recently as well about this particular topic but I just clear it up so that people understand what outsourcing is all about so that you can get a better idea. So how does this benefit you? Well, there are a few good things that I want to just point out to you. In my opinion, there’s a huge cost-saving when you outsource to people. Firstly, in terms of the time, instead of you doing it or hiring someone locally inside your business to do it, this keep saving you on tax, saving you on the costs of actually hiring someone full-time in your business. That’s one thing.

Second thing is the cost-saving. If you outsource overseas to somebody in India, Philippines or even China for example, there’s a big cost difference in terms of hiring them. And lastly, the skills you’ll be able to gain from outsourcing from other people. For example as I said for website development, if you don’t have the skills in-house or currently for yourself, then hiring someone with those skills will save you amount of time to be able to learn them. Imagine if you have to spend 10 hours to be able to learn how to upload a WordPress blog, whereas someone can complete it within 2 hours. Imagine that time-saving of 10 hours week and focus to put on something else that you can grow and leverage your time and your business as well. So that’s basically what outsourcing is all about in simplistic layman terms. All right, now what I also wanted to talk to you about is to give you an idea of what things you can do to outsource because there are so many different areas of outsourcing that’s been talked about as a hot topic as I’ve mentioned before.

In front of me right now, I’ve got a list right here that I wanted to just share with you of different types of tasks or skills that you can outsource. The first one I’ve got here is web and design development — obviously if you’ve got a website, outsource that. Getting someone to complete that for you is an excellent way to be able to get things done much quicker. Inbound customer service — if you’ve got call center like Optus, Telstra, any of the largest call center companies, they outsource all their call centers. That’s the reason why when you call them, you hit people from India, Philippines answering the calls. Outbound telemarketing — imagine if you can have huge sales force back and behind you calling out to numerous numbers that you provide them with leads and just generating sales for you. That’s another area of outsourcing.

SEO and Internet Marketing — now as an Internet marketer, a lot of people hire virtual assistants or hire SEO experts to be able to do their online marketing such as search engine optimization, link building, article marketing, all those kinds of things. Another one is backoffice and admin support. Say for example we’re looking at taking in emails, handling emails and customer support, handling product inquiries. All those kinds of things can be outsourced through the admin support and backoffice. The next one is Virtual Assistant services. What we’re looking at here is hiring someone to be able to manage day-to-day business for you being basically an assistant to getting the work done. That’s also another area of outsourcing. Next one is accounting and HR management — well, I mean that is huge overseas over there because accounting is something that people do need to do and it does cost quite a lot of people with high skill but you can outsource that quite easily. The next one is Marketing and Sales support. I cannot really quite explain much more than that but I’ve laid out the different types or categories of different outsourcing skills and type of businesses that you can get outsourced to.

Hopefully that gives you a good idea exactly what type of possibilities that you can do with outsourcing and the benefits that I can provide for you too. If you have any further comments, just leave it down below on the blog here and I love to receive your feedback. Feel free to Twitter about this, FaceBook about this, and if you’ve got any further questions, as I said leave it down the comments or simply email me as well. It’s Tyrone here from Tyroneshum.com. I’ll see you in the next video!

Tyrone: All right, welcome to the Internet Podcast with Chris Ducker and Tyrone Shum on the Tyroneshum.com blog. It’s a real pleasure to be able to have Chris on the call today, he’s our special guest. I wanted to share with you today on the call a little bit more about what Chris does because he’s a real expert in the outsourcing field and it’s really interesting to be able to see because he’s living in the Philippines, what’s he’s currently doing out there and how he’s been able to achieve excellent and growing massive business there. So, welcome Chris to the call!

Chris: And hello Tyrone, how are you?

Tyrone: Good man, I’m good.

Chris: Very good.

Tyrone: Well, firstly I wanted to start off with you just sharing your story with the audience and letting the people know what you currently do also why you’re living in the Philippines. Yeah, what’s your story?

Chris: Okay, I’ll give you in a nutshell because it’s approaching 40 years in terms of a life story. So aha, I’ll give you in a nutshell — 20 years in business, majority around the telemarketing industry and 12 years ago I came out to Asia. I started working originally in Hongkong in the film industry over there doing film distribution. Then I stumbled across to the Philippines, beautiful islands of the Philippines for a long weekend and I kind of fell in love with the place to be honest with you. Came back, made some good friends, and did some consulting work 5 years ago. That was 10 years ago when I first eventually came to the Philippines and 5 years ago I opened up my own company and started to build things up from the ground out there. We are seven people when we started including myself and my wife and now we have about 213 like that, I think all close to it something along those lines.

Tyrone: Okay, I’m going to ask you, what enticed you to move or I should say you came right into the Philippines. That’s a major move and major change in your lifestyle.

Chris: Yeah, I mean because I’ve been traveling across Asia quite frequently in quite couple of years and I was working in and out Hongkong quite a bit. I guess I probably got the bug for Asia more than anything else because I didn’t just went to Hongkong. I went over to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and when you’re in Asia it’s quite easy to travel around as you probably know. I got to the point where there was a couple of personal circumstances back in the U.K. that were quite life-changing events for me and I felt “You know what, I’m going to just screw it for a bit and see what happens…” and I was very, very lucky to get some great 2-3 years of great consultancy work over here based over in Manila and eventually I stumbled across Cebu City which is where I’m based full-time now with HSBC. They hired me to come over and basically train the telemarketers here, work with a telemarketing team. The rest is a little bit of history as I say, I guess.

Tyrone: That’s amazing. So you’ve been there now for at least 5 years. You’ve known this area for the last 10 years or so. Over the last 5 years, what have you accomplished in terms of your business and share with the audience exactly what this business is as well?

Chris: Well fundamentally, we’re an outsourcing company. We work in 3 major fields which is customer service so all of those sort of overtaking 100 numbers of inbound work, we also do quite a bit of telemarketing — lead generation, appointment setting, database cleansing, surveys those sorts of stuff and probably for the last couple of years, we’ve been quite focused on the virtual assistant aspect of outsourcing. But you know it’s a lot more than the freelancing stuff where they work on home based stuff obviously. They have this huge infrastructure that we have, the facility, and everything that goes with that. At that part of the business actually is the one that’s truly when you look at it seat-by-seat, client-based client ratio, that’s the one that’s grown fast than anything else for the last couple of years. But the telemarketing probably still has the lead a little bit on everything else that we do. We’re kind of known in telemarketing and sort of lead generation and things like that. But I mean yeah, when we started out 5 years ago, we’ve started doing nothing but telemarketing because it’s new and simple. Even though, I had been in contact centers and call centers areas in the Philippines for training purposes for consultancy and management work and things like that, I knew the industry and I knew the outsourcing world. I’ve been involved in it ever pretty much since the day I arrived in the country 10 years ago but it wasn’t like I said around in the middle of 2000, middle of 2005 where I decided, “Wait a minute, there’s way too much money being laid in this luck and I need to get involve with this.” We literally started off with 7 members of staff, we had facility which was good for around 30 but we only built desks for about 15 of them. You know literally, 8 weeks later, we’re building extra 15 desks and then free mums into it, we got 30 people working for us. We actually started as a pretty smally outsourcing company for about a year and a half or so. There’s no more than 50 people working for us for a while. It was nice because we were still kind of finding a way a little bit, we’re still learning how to market ourselves properly and things like that. We fast-forward 5 years later, we now have 3 floors in the building where we are and like I said almost 220 people are working for us so it’s moving very quickly in the last few years. The last 3 years seem a real major growth force and it’s been a rollercoaster I can tell you. It’s not simple running a growing organization in the Philippines, it’s a tough country to do business in with regards to people might say about it being paralyzed to work like “Yes, I’m 30 minutes away from the beach, and the resorts are beautiful, the waters are crystal-clear and the fishes are gorgeous and all the rest of it…” but if you’re doing business on a global scale based here, it’s a slightly different board game. You know when we’re talking about a little bit before you hit the record button. It’s not as easy as most people think particularly when you’re talking about several hundred people working for you, it’s a touch caper in it.

Tyrone: Exactly, you know I’m just dealing with one or two people and you said you’re dealing with couple of hundred people.

Chris: Yeah, indeed.

Tyrone: I think a lot of people I think will be actually curious about jumping from around 50 to say 200 people in that span of time. Did you get the demand first before you decided to fill the seats or was it like basically you said “Okay, we’re looking to target at growing at this pace. I need to get these seats put in there…” Which was it?

Chris: Sure, like I said when we first setup, we had a relatively small area on the 5th floor building which is now where my own personal office where I’m sitting at right now. That space was good for 30, we’ve expanded it to about good for about 60 after about 8 or 9 months being in the business. Then we filled it up like I said we basically stayed at that sort or level for about a year and a half to 3 years or so. I think we went from 60 to about a hundred. We’re very lucky we’re in a building where the landlord’s contract we had it written that he would give us first that we use on any space in the building. It was a relatively old building about 10 years old but the infrastructure is great, cable wires everything like that. But we’re actually above the number 1 high-end dealership in the entire country — it’s a 5-story building and the first story has obviously nothing but cars. Right?

Tyrone: Exactly.

Chris: So it’s a very easy place. You know when we have clients coming to visit us they say, “How do I find your office?” and we say “It’s in blah, blah street…” then they’ll say “Where the hell is that?” Just get in a taxi and tell him it’s like a high-end building, and they’re able to find it. It’s a very big showroom.

Tyrone: Just make sure your virtual staff don’t go downstairs and start to testdrive cars and put on their credit cards.

Chris: That’s right, exactly. They got them locked up pretty good. It was something that was planned I think in every major growth step. You know we consistently have seats empty waiting to be filled. We build out and then fill them up, build out a little bit more and fill them up. So went from the 5th floor which was a relatively small area and we took the entire 3rd floor which was kind of our own showroom I guess where we have the lobby, conference room, training room, chill-out lounge for the staff, the pantry area and then the entire floor has all the servers down there, everything’s there. Then, we also then took about free calls on the second floor for additional calling space and VA space as well. It’s slowly but surely, we got about 40 seats empty right now. I mean they’ll be filled by the end of the year, but easy, easy.

Tyrone: That’s interesting because what we are going to probably talk about is I want to jump over to your blog that you’ve created called the Virtual Business Lifestyle. This is how Chris and I actually met, I contacted Chris through the Virtual Business Lifestyle blog and also I think I sent you a message on FaceBook and Twitter as well. We got in contact and we started chatting and this is how we came across the interview. But it was very interesting because we complemented each other very well, we are both in the outsourcing field and we like to teach people and we also have very much similar mindset. What I wanted to ask as well for the audience is to ask you what inspired you to create this blog firstly?

Chris: My wife, actually.

Tyrone: Okay, that’s interesting.

Chris: As with most lucky guys say you know usually there’s usually this decent woman behind all or to the side of them and sometimes in front. But no, I mean leading the way, leading the bloody way right? Come on, this isn’t a family production we’re talking about.

Tyrone: Family channel, yes.

Chris: Terrible, basically you’ve completely lost me now. But okay, it was my wife’s idea to start a blog and it was basically, it came about because last year, I think it was around the end of the first quarter I started my blog ChrisDucker.com which is now no more. But I started talking about anything and everything you can think of. Following one of the most successful posts on the blog was about outsourcing — what it is, how it works, how to do it, how to not do it. It was quite months to post, there’s good couple of thousand words. But usually when they get a long blog post like that usually people are like “Geez, I’m not going to read all that, that’s insane.” But it became very popular, there were about 70 or 80 comments on there by the time I took it off, I mean that’s sort of period of months. But I mean that for a blog that has come out from nowhere, it became quite popular.

Tyrone: Exactly.

Chris: I noticed that all of the posts that I’ve been putting on there that were in relation to creating more free lifestyle but still revolving around business so you can make money and living more of virtual kind of life, been able to travel while seamlessly at work and things like that, I noticed it was those particular posts that were showing all real interest on the blog. I did a post about how I did a fantastic experience in Starbucks with my son and the staff at Starbucks. I love writing that blog post because it was very close to my heart but I’ve had like 5 comments on it. That was a very popular blog post and I thought it was great! But tt didn’t quite float with the audience. The bottom-line here is that those kind of posts became more popular and so we sat down over Christmas period and I was sort of strategizing a little bit for this year for growth, things like that and making some key-highs. It just sort of went into one thing that led to another and she said to me, “You know what you should do, you should create a site where you’re giving away advice, starting discussions and a community where people can come and talk about that kind of lifestyle design and still revolving around business but with a real heavy twist on outsourcing and virtual staff and things like that because that’s what I do, that’s what I know.” It’s kind of hit me and I was just “Okay, what am I going to call it?” She came up with the name, she came up with everything. It was quite ironic because I’ve been involved to marketing and sales, branding in my whole career and I didn’t come up with a single thing so it was all down to her. Honey, if you’re watching, thank you.

Tyrone: It’s always them. They’re always gearing us good values.

Chris: We shouldn’t really tell them so much right? That will create problems at some point. But no, it just managed the snowboard. We’ve launched it in the middle of we’re up to where week away from being 6 months old and it’s just spoiled. I’ve been interviewed by so many people and I get asked literally daily to do guest posts for people and things like that. The big thing surrounding the blog is my goal for this year and that was the main focus when we launched it. I launched it with a video post and told everybody about my 2000-thing goal. A lot of people have quite a few goals that they want to achieve every year but I wanted to put together the mother of all goals and that is to completely and actually remove myself from this brick-and-mortar business on a day-to-day basis and become a full-time virtual CEO by the end of this year. Without giving the entire giveaway because no one will come and visit the blog otherwise. The bottom-line is I’ve broken the goals down to month by month miniature goals. We tried to achieve and in fact actually I’m 3 weeks ahead of June so far and slowly but surely it’s developing. The one big major requirement for this goal to be hit is for me to hire another foreigner, another expat as we call them here in the Philippines. Predominantly, they have to be American because 80% of all marketers are Americans and once I hire that one person, the rest is just icing on a cake really. Once I’ve got that person, I can become fundamentally do whatever I do everyday here myself and I can leave. I may hit the goal sooner if I can find that person, I don’t know.

Tyrone: That is great. I mean looking at replacing yourself is something that I think a lot of people want to be able to achieve. If you can achieve it in the scale of your business, there’s a huge market out there who wants to be able to follow your footsteps. I’m for one who’s really, really excited because I’ve been following your goals as well. It’s just really interesting to be able to learn so much from it. I’m sort of on the small scale of things but I’m still quite happy with what I’ve got and achieved here. For people who want to achieve what Chris’ doing, this is a fantastic way to be able to learn how he’s done it. This is a real inspiration to be able to learn straight from you because you’re doing what you do, you know you walk your footsteps and you really do what you talk as well.

Chris: But on the blog itself just so for your viewers, now on the blog itself, there are actually monthly reports for the dues at the end of every month where I talk about what I did that month to get myself one step closer to that ultimate goal. And when I say virtual, I mean completely virtual — I don’t want this chair, I don’t want this nice office, I don’t want a place that is Chris’ place in this building for my company. I want to come in the office once a week for a 2-hour management meeting and that’s it. The rest of the time, I’ll work out of my home office so I’m completely setup at home as well so I work out of my home office and anywhere else I want to. That’s the whole deal.

Tyrone: Exactly. Do you see yourself as well once you’ve created this virtual CEO, what do you see yourself doing once you’ve get yourself out of the business and working less?

Chris: Absolutely nothing. No, I’m just joking. I would go stuck crazy doing nothing everyday.

Tyrone: I can see that already.

Chris: I understand when people say “You know if I’m going to sell my own company, I’m going to get $10 million, I’m not doing anything for the rest of my life…” and I’m like how boring life crap is that? I mean it’s just so crap, why would you want to do that? I have a couple of business interests that I don’t really focus on right now that I would like to focus on to see what I can make off them. They don’t really making a whole lot of money but they do okay but I also have a lot of plans for the online world in producing very high quality information products for aspiring lifestyle designers and virtual boxers, things like that. They really all obviously, they’re not happening this year. I’m actually going to launch a brand new service in July which will bridge the gap between the service provided virtual staff and the freelancing virtual staff. It will bridge the gap perfectly in regards to the uneasiness and unreliable kind of factual work from freelancers from time to time. We’re completely eliminating that sort of stuff and I can’t get to much more about it but we’re still finalizing it. When the time comes, I’ll tell you about it so you can let your guys know.

Tyrone: Yep.

Chris: But the bottom-line is that’s the one online project that we’re launching and probably I think I’m about halfway through an e-book in regards to the work of a virtual staff as well which is a very condensed e-book, it’s not one of those waffling e-books which are 120 pages long and it looks pretty, things like that. It will still look pretty but it won’t be 120 pages long. To be honest with you it’s priceless, I can be literally giving it away to give people the opportunity to learn from it a little bit. But there’s going to be a lot of different things and that’s the whole point about versifying your income and creating several strings of passive income which is part of the process for the Virtual Business Lifestyle and we’ll see what happens. I’m a pretty flexible fellow and I’m not one of those guys who are sort of rigid who knows what he does in business. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s only your way to do business. That’s why I think you mentioned you’re quite happy with what you’re doing right now, the money you’re making and the way you’re living your life and your success. You’re already a success.

Tyrone: Everybody has got their own definitions of success and it doesn’t mean you’re going to get other people’s approval. As long as you’re happy within your own life, you could be making $500 a week living the lifestyle that you enjoy.

Chris: Exactly.

Tyrone: I know that there are plenty of people doing that as well. There are people who can make million dollars in a year and I’m happy so you have to look at what success has defined you not other people’s successes. Absolutely you’re creative with that one.

Chris: Absolutely, yep.

Tyrone: Are you interested in going back in the U.K or in the U.S. once you create this virtual business lifestyle or virtual CEO. Or do you plan to stay in the Philippines?

Chris: Full time? Probably not, to be frank with you. I do want to spend a little bit more time in the United States mainly for business reasons. I get over there once a year pretty religiously and I’m usually there for about a month at the time when I’m there. For the last year, I’ve actually been taking and I’m going to quote Mr. Ferriss here. I’ve been taking mini, what do you call these…mini retirements where I’ve been doing a month here and there. I’ve really enjoyed them and I’ve also found that even though I’m exposed to those mini retirements, I’ve been incredibly productive in that kind of setting so I wanted to do a little bit more traveling with my family as well and we’ll see what happens. As for going back full time, I mean for the U.K. absolutely not, no way. The U.K. now is a completely different country to the one that I grew up in and enjoyed growing up in. You know when I go back there now and I find myself shaking my head and you ask anybody, anybody in my age in the U.K. would say exactly the same thing. If they not, if they can’t say exactly the same thing, they are either blinds or deaf or they’re just mental phased because the place is just going to crap, it really is. It’s not the same country. Look, I’m English and I’m patriotic and I’m very true in the lands of tomorrow and things like that, but the bottom-line is that I would not want to live in the U.K. full-time again, I wouldn’t want to do it. Both myself and my wife enjoy the U.S. and we are eying San Francisco or L.A. one of the two

Tyrone: Nice.

Chris: And there maybe a little good quality six to eight weeks at the beginning in next year. We’ll also probably do a month in England as well and we’ll see what else happens, there you go. But that month would be July/August month. That would be the whole months.

Tyrone: That’s a nice practical advice there so you’re not coming back there.

Chris: No. We’ll spoil here in the Philippines, you know the weather is beautiful all the time and we’ll completely spoil.

Tyrone: Well you’re lucky, it’s freezing here today. It’s been freezing for the last few months and that way, it keeps you in bed. But if some of those comes around, they’ll definitely come under Australia, it’s a nice place. Check it out as well.

Chris: You know what, I always want to come around there, I just never get around to it. I’m only 8,9 hours away from it or whatever it is…

Tyrone: Exactly!

Chris: I know, and it’s just as easy to get on a plane. Get Sydney, or Perth or wherever anybody then it is getting on a plane going to Hongkong or anywhere else. It’s just slightly long and a little bit expensive but I will have to do Australia actually. I’ve never done it, I have always wanted to so you know maybe you can pick me up from the airport.

Tyrone: Yeah, whenever that happens. Sounds good. All right, I want to sort of go on to a little bit more to helping and giving some valuable content, not that we haven’t been giving a lot of content today but for anyone who’s starting out in their internet business and who are looking to outsource as well, what three tips of advice can you give to people who are looking to outsource to say, Philippines and looking to create a business lifestyle like yourself?

Chris: Three tips…okay, there’s really two major ways to be able to outsource to the Philippines. The first one is with a provider like our company, somebody who’s setup in a relatively large building with a great infrastructure, management all the rest of it, and then you can outsource in a freelance way. I think probably a lot of people are going to be watching this and visit your blog as well as mine to be very frank, I’ll probably going to be more leaning towards the freelancing because it’s a cheaper version quite frankly, plain and simple. So we’ll focus on that one otherwise I’ll just be waffling on like “Yeah, get the freelancer stuff…” so that’s what I’ll focus on. When you work with a freelancer, there are three major tips that I usually give out. The first one is make sure that you make your expectations of your virtual assistant very clear in terms of the way you want work done, the way you want it produced, I mean I’m talking about the details, I’m a detail-freak. Write the way down to what font you use, what size of the font you use, everything because ultimately you may have to spend a little bit of time to going through those specifics and being clear in those things at the beginning but ultimately you don’t have to correct them all the time. Correcting somebody at a distance particularly through on different time zone, it’s a lot harder and time consuming than it is if you’re registered in the same office where you can talk to each other on the same desks. I have a luxury of having a personal assistant here in the office literally on the other side of world over there, she’s spectacular. But I also actually hire and work with two virtual assistants who have not anything to do with the company. The reason why I do that and the main reason why I started it is because I wanted to experience the freelancer route myself. So I know what I’m talking about when I’m talking to the readers’ blog and things like that. But as time has progressed for both of those, I mean working with them for about four months now, I now utilize them very heavily every single day. They both on a full-time payroll for me and they’re both fantastic. Finally enough, they’re both actually here in Cebu so I do get to meet them and I buy them pizza or ice cream stuffs like that and everybody’s happy. Getting back to the question, the first one is being real clear on your expectations, the second one is when you’re working with tasks is to put timelines in place because if you don’t, nothing’s really prioritized. You’ll find that VAs do need that kind of guidance, really heavily in terms of timelines. You’re not just giving them one task a day, you can give them several tasks then there’s going to be what I call revolving tasks that they do everyday — be it comment on blogs for you, or send tweets on your behalf or whatever the case maybe. So you have to with any major project or any major tasks, you have to put timelines in place. The third one is very simple — pay them on time.

Tyrone: I like that one.

Chris: As simple as that. Telling you right now in the Philippines particularly with the freelancing virtual assistants that I’ve met, I mean I’ve done seminars for them so I’ve met hundreds of freelancing VAs over here, everything from admin assistants to web programmers. The number one break with virtual assistants in the Philippines is getting paid late because here this is not about generally building a career. It’s about job security, job stability and you know a week before payday is here, they’ve already spent the month. They’re giving this to the sister for college, they’re giving this to their mothers for the rent, and it really is. You pay a Filipino late man, I’m telling you, and they’re not going to stick around very long. Plain and simple.

Tyrone: I know that and that happens generally in any industry. I’ve been working with trades people, they love it when you pay on time especially when I was running my other Dragonboat business, since I paid on my supplies on time, I’ll get the deliveries right and expected.

Chris: Absolutely!

Tyrone: It’s the same relationship. It’s big, big thing and make sure you look over you staff and pay them on time.

Chris: That’s it. We actually have virtual assistants who’ve worked with Live2Sell and who’s virtual bosses are say in the U.S. or in the U.K. whatever and you would be surprised and this is actually down to me telling our clients to do these types of things because it does keep all VAs happy and with us instead of working with another company is that I say to them, “After you’ve developed a relationship with them, after they do a really good job on a major task or major project for you, don’t just say thank you, yes say thank you but do it in a way that they really are going to remember.” We’ve had flowers delivered at the office, we’ve had FedEx packages with books and DVDs, and we’ve actually had, we actually had one and I swear it’s true. I asked the guy if I could do a press release about it because it’s just a PR magic but you would never let me do it. We actually had a relationship between a virtual boss and the VA developed so enrich that he asked his VA to be present at his wife’s birth via Skype. I swear. The reason why is because the VA actually was a registered nurse here in the Philippines, back in the nursing industry to come and work in a call center environment. Because the boss himself was traveling all the time, she developed quite a relationship and quite a rapport with the wife. She talked about the kid’s schooling, doing this and doing that and all sorts of stuff. So quite a relationship built up and she was there for the birth.

Tyrone: Wow, that’s…

Chris: That’s probably ultimate conclusion for the birth. It was a U.S. client I wasn’t on the shift that night but I do remember several of the staff laughing and joking about it the next day and saying, “Why can’t I do things like that, that’s just an easy job.” Being in the buzz, you know what I mean.

Tyrone: Oh, that is amazing, that’s fantastic. What you shared is definitely called a laugh story there.

Chris: Laughed 5 years in business, if you don’t have few stories like that you tell them you haven’t done a very good job in business right?

Tyrone: Exactly, I’m pretty sure, there’ll be more stories to come which we’ll share to the audience another time. I think we should probably even one podcast story after story.

Chris: Just a story? Story time with Tyrone!

Tyrone: That’s excellent. All right Chris, I wanted to wrap this up now and let the audience know that they can still get in contact with you. You seem to be someone who’s very easy to talk to which I found going to know you over this short period of time. How will people get in contact with you Chris?

Chris: You can invite them on the blog, plain and simple it’s VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com. You can also find me on Twitter and FaceBook, and you can get all the links on the YouTube channel. I do quite a bit video posting and things like that. Actually if you guys are interested in virtual assistance out there on your readership, I have 10 video clips, very short and condensed about 2 minutes each that I shot on a beautiful paradise here called Boracay at the beginning of the year — my top ten virtual assistant video tips and you can find them on YouTube. But just go to my blog VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com and everything else is there.

Tyrone: I’ll definitely put that as links down the bottom and insert. I’ll make sure people will get them.

Chris: Awesome.

Tyrone: It’s a pleasure to be able to do this podcast interview with you and I hope that the audience has benefited quite a lot from this. Thanks very much again Chris.

Chris: No problem.

Tyrone: If anyone wants to find anymore podcasts out or listening to anything similar to this, just go to Tyroneshum.com. My name is Tyrone Shum from Tyroneshum.com. Have a great day and catch up soon!