Hi it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. In today’s topic, I want to share with you the reasons why I outsourced to the Philippines and I want to share with you a little story how I first started in the Philippines and started my outsourcing journey. Going back probably couple of years ago now, I read up on Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week and when I first read that book, I was inspired to be able to get out of situation I was in.

I was basically running a business that’s successfully generated a 6-figure income but because of all my time involved in the business, I had no other time to do anything else. I was running all the dispatching, I was doing all the customer service support, handling literally everything from day-to-day. I was working crazy 60 hours a week. Now, what I was doing was basically working myself down to the ground and running a successful business in terms of finance success but I was not having the time that I thought business could give me.

So with that idea in mind and after reading the 4-Hour Work Week, it gave me incentive to look at something such as outsourcing. What Tim was able to share with me in his story was that he’s able to leverage his time, get other people to work for him and automate and setup a system to be able to outsource as much as he can. He talked a lot about outsourcing to India and I tried a lot of the website that he recommended inside the book such as going to Elance to look for people to outsource to and also to look onto hiring an Indian on his website and also a lot of good websites that I had looked at.

But, time and time again I was struggling to find the right people because firstly, when I first thought I’ve hired someone from India I thought I’ve got the perfect virtual assistant, I’ll have everything all done for me and things will be smooth and sailing. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. I had absolutely wasted more time trying to get this Indian virtual assistant to do what I want them to do. I thought wow, I’m getting $4.15 US and I thought man, this is great because I was hiring someone just a customer support staff to help with a lot of other things for about 20-25 bucks an hour. You can imagine the cost saving and I thought this is great; I could easily get rid of a lot of work that I have to do when I outsource somebody to India.

But because of what I didn’t realize was the cultural differences, there was a lot of misunderstanding, things didn’t work out to how I envision it to be. After that first experience of going through to India and realizing that this is not exactly what I’m looking for, I decided of taking a bit of a break and stop hiring people from India. It was only after a further attempt of trying to outsource, and taking some time off to think what I did wrong and tried to follow Tim’s instructions again when I actually felt I have stumbled across somebody in the Philippines. It was just by accident in all honesty and it was like I’ll put up another ad in Elance and hopefully I’ll find someone. Then I found someone who’s just very, very eager to email me back and said “I’m from the Philippines and I’m more than happy to help you get started and would you like to give me a go?”

I said why not, and it’s something like $3 an hour and thought let’s just give it a go. Since then, I have been so fortunate to have a great virtual assistant team back in hiring from the Philippines and I was stuck with them. That was the reason and turning point for me to choose Philippines as a place to go to hire. When I did that, I just didn’t realize it was just a complete fresh breath of air and also a complete change for me to be able to find the right people to do my work and also outsource to. So, let me tell you the reasons why I’ve chosen and why I’ve been stuck in the Philippines.

The first one: Philippines has a very good background and structure system in place in terms of technology and they’ve also got people who are highly skilled as well. Second reason is their language. Their culture differences are not that different to what we understand in the Western culture because the Philippines has been colonized by the Americans and they’ve got strong sense of Western culture in them. They understand English very well and they wouldn’t be such a big clash in terms of explaining information to them. Those are big differences in terms of I’m explaining to an Indian person because when I told them one thing and they did it in another thing. The culture they have is when I say “I want you to complete this. Can you complete this in this time?” They’ll say “Yeah, no problem. I’ll do it for you and get it done in time.” Then I’ll come back with the work and it’s all completely wrong.

Whereas in the Philippines like when I say “Can you please get this done in time. Also, email me back in Tuesday…” They usually just come back and say “I’ll do my best Sir to try get it done for you but I can’t guarantee you that it’ll be completed by Tuesday. Is it okay if I’ll send it back to you on Wednesday?” Usually if they say that to me and being honest upfront, I’m like wow, no problems. Just extend it for another day and just get the work done properly. Pretty much, ten times I’ve received the work and it’s been done on time and exceeded my expectations.

That’s one of the major reasons why I’ve chosen the Philippines as well. The third reason is because the Filipinos are also very loyal and very honest. I found that having that trait in them, they don’t want to start learning business but they want to work with someone because they want that secure income and that secured job that you can provide for them. By providing that for me, you actually are providing them with the job and secured income and they’ll give back to you loyalty, honesty and excellent work. That’s what I found, if I look onto them, they’ll look after me and it’s a win-win situation. Their honesty and loyalty is a crucial factor because ultimately, I’m hiring them on a full time basis to be able to manage my business and be able to do the things that I need them to be completed. They’re being able to give me that time back to do other things that I want them to do because I can trust them and know that they’re responsible for them.

It’s like you and me because I understand what it is but they just want a job to be able to get things done for you. So those are really the main reasons why I’ve chosen to stick with the Philippines and why outsourcing to the Philippines is an excellent way to be able to get your business up and running and growing. I just known for a fact that the large companies are doing it right now — they’re hiring lots and lots of people from the Philippines and obviously if they’re doing that, there are huge opportunities for you to do the same. Even if you only have a small business starting out, and just wanting to get into the Philippines to outsource your business to, I highly recommend it. It just takes a bit of time but once you get them all up and running and trained them up right, they can really give back so much to you. The power of leveraging your time and outsourcing your work to the right people can really make your business grow so fast. That’s what happened to me.

I just wanted to share that little tip for you and also the reasons why and hopefully if you can see the successes I’ve had with this, you can also achieve the same thing as well. Okay, that’s it for today. If you have any comments and any things that have happened to you, if you’ve outsourced to India, China, Romania, or Philippines which is what I’ve been talking about today and your experiences — good, bad, etc. please leave your feedback below. I love to hear all that from you and for me to also give you a hand when you get stuck or any of the questions that you may have on outsourcing to the Philippines.

That’s it for me today, my name is Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. I’ll see you in the next video!