Your Outsourcing Questions Answered

Over the last few months I have been running teleconferences every fortnight for my students and I have accumulated a lot of common questions that gets asked regularly. It was very interesting to find out that it's not just my students that have these questions, but also many business owners around the world have asked these questions as well. How I know is I regularly check forums to see what is happening within outsourcing.

What I've created below is a video that goes for around 20 minutes and it answers a lot of the common questions and I even give away a lot of tips on how to leverage your Internet Business. So take a moment now to watch it:

Transcript:

Hi, Tyrone Shum here from MassOutsource.com. Welcome to this video! This video has been created so that I can help answer any of the questions that students and any people such as business owners from around the world have asked and a lot of the questions has to do with outsourcing and how to setup their business so that they can be outsourced to people over in the Philippines.

What I want to do now is go through and answer the most common questions that people wanted to have answered and also be able to give them guidance, some tips and also strategies on how to be able to outsource their business. This whole video presentation is for you to be able to benefit from and gain some knowledge and be able to get out there and start outsourcing your entire business. Hopefully with all the information that I provide here, you’ll be able to take away, get started and take action straightaway. So enjoy this, and just see how I’ll be answering a lot of these questions as well so it can benefit for you:

Where do I start?

This is a very common question and also very good question too. A lot of people who are just starting out and internet entrepreneurs wanting to run a business online and also those running the business for 6 months to 12 months plus are getting to the point where they say “I don’t know how to explain, how to grow and how to leverage business…” then basically you’ll want to look out outsourcing as the next level to be able to get your business running to where you want it to be. So where do we start with this?

The first thing I do is just to gain some experience exactly on how to go about outsourcing. I know you’re not going to get it right at the beginning and this is the reason why I’ve created this video for you and also to be able to answer these questions for you.

I know from experience when I first started to outsource a lot of work that I’m doing in my business, I struggled because I don’t know where to go, how to get the right people in place and also what systems to put in place and give them the right tasks to do. A lot of times I’ve been through and been ripped off as per sé and also not paid the correct price, a lot of times wasted as well. I don’t want you to go through that. I want you to fastrack your success to be able to achieve the goals that you want in your business.

Now, the first thing that we want to look at is getting some experience and also some knowledge. Let’s take step back — the most important thing that I believe in is Knowledge. Get some trained knowledge on how to go about doing it. What I would do is there are some free videos that I have in my MassOutsource.com website — 10 free videos on Where, How, and When to manage these people and a lot of these are towards hiring people from the Philippines. Go through and have a look on those videos just to be able to get started. It’s all absolutely free so there’s no strings attached.

Though, to gain experience, if you just have the knowledge and you don’t have experience, you wouldn’t be able to succeed in outsourcing your business. The first thing I would do is to either go out or find someone and hire them on a contract basis just to give them one project to start off with, learn to manage with them and learn to train them and see what they can do. Once you get that first trial over, and you know what to do from there then you can start to hire these people on a full time or part time basis.

When I first started, I went straight to eLance and I hired a virtual assistant to be able to get started in outsourcing my tasks. That experience wasn’t the best because I hired people from India. It took a lot longer and the cost was much higher. Now, you may be wondering how much did it cost and also how long did it take.

The first task that I outsourced was basically to handle and create a website, simple WordPress website. I got charged about $6 an hour which is quite okay but the matter of time that they spent to setup a WordPress blog it took about 30 hours so it’s about $180 just to setup one WordPress blog. When you compare to see how long it really takes, for me, I can have it installed myself within 2 hours so it should have been charged $12 just to be able to setup that first blog.

So that was a learning experience for me. What I found was I when I first went to eLance, it was also on contract basis. When you go to contract basis, you basically hire them on per project that means you pay a little bit more but also at the same time you lost the skill set that they have because a lot of times they have multiple projects that they may be running. That’s not the root that I recommend you taking down. I would recommend hiring people at least on a minimum of part time then if you see the need and you’ll have more work for them, hire them on full time basis.  That’s why I would recommend starting off first.

Where can I find cheap, reliable and honest people to work for me?

This question is very common as well to where to start finding people that is cheap, reliable and also honest which will give you the time back. Well, first thing as I mentioned, Philippines is a great place to start. Secondly, they are quite cheap. Currently with the rate that’s in Philippines, on average if you’re looking to hire virtual assistant on part time basis, you’ll probably be looking at something between $125 to $180 per month that’s with part time which is 20 hours a week.

So if you pay them $125 per month working for you for 20 hours a week which is quite a lot of hours, you can imagine what kind of work you can do. Plus, if they don’t know the things that you have, then you can begin to train them. Once you train them and you’ve got all the systems in place to train them, basically they’ll retain that knowledge and will be able to continue to manage and grow the business for you. So that’s one thing that I would start. If you’re ready to start full time, then you could probably hire a full virtual assistant for at least $250 per month signing out.

How do I kn
ow if they are really working and how do I track this?

This is a very good question and I get this question all the time. It’s not something that’s easy because you may find it difficult to be able to track what they’re doing. You may give them a task and say it may take them 5 or 6 hours to do but you do not know whether or not they’re completing the task or if they’ve outsourced it themselves. From my experience, I haven’t had that issue within the Philippines but I know within India I’ve had that before.

I’ve got a story for you. I hired a full time programmer from India paying about $500 per month. This person did a reasonable job for me. He wasn’t good at graphic work but what I found was that he could do the programming. Though he told me that he was working on my projects for full time but when I did found out and the work that was sent back wasn’t correct and also complete, I questioned him. I’ve found out that he was travelling all around the country and he outsourced a lot of his work to some friends. I was blown away that he could do that because he didn’t even give me notice that he’s going to find someone to work on my project and furthermore, it’s just wasn’t done properly. That was the end of that one and I’ve just gave that one go.

But I don’t want you to go through that experience because going through there, you do waste a lot of time. Ultimately, what we want to do is to be able to fastrack your success rather than spending so much time learning and finding out all the ins and outs. This is what this course is all about, it’s to skip across on all of that so you don’t have to worry about those things. So, why the Philippines and also what are you going to do to be able to track them? The first thing I would do is that once you’ve hired your first virtual assistant or virtual staff in your business, you want to be able to set them up with the right systems.

The first thing I would usually do is I’ll send them a setup guide on how to set up their responsiblities and also their daily accountability. The first thing I usually do to track them is I install a little piece of software called RescueTime. You can download it from RescueTime.com. It’s a fantastic little software that’s free but you can also upgrade to pro versions which gives you more functionality. Though I currently use the free version which is very simple to use and very easy to do.

All they have to do is to register with an account and once they’ve registered the account, they’ll just download this little piece of software which gets installed onto their computer. What will happen is that as soon as they start to turn on their computer and logging in for their work day, it starts tracking exactly what they do. It tracks the applications that they open, it tracks the websites that they’re on, all the things that you need to know just to what they’re doing. Obviously, if they’re doing the work that they’ll need to do then everything will be logged properly. If they’re not, then you can go back to them and start asking questions about why that’s not done.

That usually doesn’t happen very often but if it does, that way, you can at least have some proof and evidence to prove to them that they’re not completing the work on time. So that’s a great little piece of software that I recommend to install as well. Also, as I mentioned Daily Accountability, they have to submit it to me on a daily basis answering three main simple questions. The first question I usually ask them is, “What have you completed for me today?” second questions is, “What are some of the problems or issues that you may have?” and last question, “What are some of the things that I can do to help improve and grow you so that you can be better on what you do?” — an e.g. training, additional resource that I’ll need to provide, and so forth.

As long as they answer these three questions, and submit their report on what they’ve done on a day to day basis then at least that way they’ve been accountable to what they’re doing, and also I’m keeping track of what work that’s been done. That’s a great way to do it. Now, taking a step further, if you later on decides to hire a project manager, they can manage all these things for you. That’s where you want to take your business to a next level later on but I’ll cover that on another topic later on.

How do I communicate with them and get work done?

Let’s look at how to setup a system or what kind of system I recommend to use to manage your virtual staff. Let’s say for example you’ve already set up and you’ve got say 3, 4 virtual staff on your team doing various different like web development, managing customer support, graphic designing, doing copywriting and so forth. You can either manage them through using just email and they’ll communicate sending emails back and forth to you which can become really a heavy thing on you because a lot of times they may send you not one email a day but they may send you 10 to 15 emails asking questions this and that.

You don’t want to do that because at the end of the day, what we want to do is we set up a system that runs itself so that you are basically just overlooking the system and not being involved in it. Remember, “not being involved” that’s the key and what you’ll want to do is be able to traffic or overlook like an inspector of what’s going on. So how do we do this? We’ve got a project management system within my business that I run and it’s called ActiveCollab. It’s a fantastic system that you can install on your server. I know that there’s a lot of other project management systems out there that’s also free like DotProject Net, and also there’s a few like ClockingIt, those are great project management systems and they are also free but they are limited because they are locked into a server.

Whereas, what you probably want to be able to do the reason why I recommend using ActiveCollab is because you want to run on your own server so you don’t rely on other people’s servers to be able to continue to manage your business. You can always get your data around if anything happens and you’ve got backups on it as well. I’m not saying that the other systems don’t have backups, it’s just that the monthly fee and cost that add up to run those are probably just as high. While when you just buy ActiveCollab, which is a software that you can buy for around I think $300 to $400 for a corporate version outright, you can keep it forever.

The reason why I recommend using a software like that is because everyone is able to communicate and manage the project within each. You can set multiple projects, multiple users, and lots of things to be able to do. I’ll give you a great example. Say for example you’ve got a project that you need to set up a website and you have maybe 3 people working on it. You probably have a copywriter, a web developer and also you have a graphics designer. To set up a website isn’t that high, but to get it exactly the way you want, you’ll have to draw your specification. Once your specification has been drawn up, then you can outsource it to all your staff to do it.

Now, they’re going to communicating with each other because there
217;ll be different stages, different parts of the project where they need to talk. So having a project management system to be able to store information and allow them access to do all of these things will save you so much time. Rather coming back to Tyrone, or rather coming back to say for example the graphic designer asking where the login details, it’s all stored inside one project management system. They can access that anytime to be able to get access to the login details, to be able to get access to files that they need, the graphic work and so forth. That’s how I would manage a project and also how I recommend people to do it. That way it saves you time, you don’t have to check emails, and secondly, everything’s all stored into one location.

Let’s just say for example, I went on holidays and one of the projects will due in weeks time and I wasn’t around. Who would be able to provide them with the information to be able to access the server and update the files? I’m not going to be here because I’ll not be checking my emails so the project management system is crucial because that’s what you need to be there for. That’s how you manage your staff and quickly get things done. It minimizes the amount of emails, it minimizes the amount of time that you need to use and spend on it, and you can hop in anytime just to check what’s going on and see the reports and reviews.

How and when do you pay outsourcers for their work?

Let’s talk about pay. Well as I mentioned to you if you’re looking to hire virtual staff on a full time basis and also part time basis as well, then you’ll need to set up a system to pay them as well. It’s not that hard to do and there are few payment services that I use and how I pay them is quite simple. I usually pay them every fortnight, or if some of them prefer, I usually schedule for at least monthly basis. Ideally monthly is a great thing because that way you can plan for your cashflow. But fornightly is sometimes requested by staff so I do that as well. It’s quite simple.

All you have to do is either set up and use either PayPal which is what I currently use or Xoom and both of those systems are great. PayPal wasn’t really that established back then in the Philippines but now it’s quite commonly and widely used. The fee is relatively low. Recently I’ve just sent pay through Paypal over to one of my virtual staffs and the fee is around $1.25 US just for one transaction so the fees are not that expensive to transfer money accross. Whereas Xoom is about if I remember correctly it’s $7.50 per person so we’ve got $15 and Xoom is getting more expensive to be able to transfer money accross, the reason why is that Xoom is becoming more and more popular.  But if your virtual staff doesn’t have PayPal, and they’re going to Xoom then I recommend that as well. Those are two payment systems that I recommend because they’re both safe and widely used around the world.

Do I have to pay taxes for them?

Taxes! Well, it depends to which country you’re in. The first thing I want to mention and say is that I’m no legal advicer, I don’t have an experience in terms of accounting, I don’t have a qualification in accounting so I can’t give you that advice on how you go about your taxes. I would highly recommend you go and speak to your accountant and find out exactly what would be best for your company and also how would it be best for your tax structure within your own business. But I’ll give you an example anyway because we’re talking about how to handle taxes and so forth.

A lot of times when you’re working with the people in the Philippines, you don’t have to worry about paying taxes for them because they handle their own taxes within their own country. So that’s number one thing, you don’t have to worry about those taxes within their own country — they handle their own super for example, they handle all that and they pay for their own taxes. For me, in Australia for example, in terms of paying for taxes we basically treat them as business expense. And because they are contracted out, they are all considered business expense. All I have to do is just pay them the monthly fee and at the end of my financial year, we basically just work it out and I’ll set it deducted from my profit and that’s how we bascially work it out.

That’s the beauty of actually having outsources, it’s because there’s no headaches of running a HR department or Human Resources department, there’s no headaches doing the paperwork for managing the super, managing the taxes, managing the sick leave and all those things. That’s why it’s so beneficial to actually run people or have people running your business overseas in the Philippines. So that’s pretty much on taxes, I would highly recommend you speak to your accountant or tax advicer on what to do in this situation but on the general overview or scheme of things that’s basically how easy it is and simple to look at.

I don’t have time to train people. How can I outsource my work if I don’t have time?

Well, I can understand because being entrepreneur and someone who has started out doing everything myself and running a business basically from 15 hours to 20 hours on average can bring it down to less than that, it has been quite a lot of work. I used to do at least 60 hours a week or 12 hours a day roughly. Since having an outsourced business and having people running business for me, I’ve been able to bring that down dramatically. And, the hottest thing that I struggled with was did I have time to train them? The simple answer was no, I didn’t have time training them because I’m so busy running my business but I’ll have to make time to do that.

Now, yes, you’ll need to spend some time training them though there are great systems that are out there who already got taining in place. Just to give you a little bit of overview, for example in my Mass Outsource Mastermind video training course that I provide for students and members, I have lots of training videos in there that I provide for anyone to train their virtual staff particulary for internet marketing — anything from SEO, to article marketing, to link building, to building lots of great websites and blogs, and so forth. All that kinds of training are all provided in there and we are always expanding and adding more to the training resources as well.

So to save your time, if you join into the Mass Outsource training program, there are a lot of great training materials in there. That alone already basically has paid off for a lot of your time because if you spend say an hour training your people within say for example in the Philippines, you can basically take these training videos and give it to them and training videos itself already paid off and you don’t have to spend more time to do any of these. That’s the beauty of that, once your staff has been all trained up, then you can just give them a task to do.

Coming back to training them, you’ll probably need to spend a bit of time to get to know them and just focus your time on providing your business information. Though once you’ve got that all set up and you’ve provided them working with training and virtual staff at the same time, you’re going to be able to see a dramatic change in your business and also more
time for you. Yes, there all going to be times that you’re going to spend time training them but once you’ve got your first one trained up, and you just decided hiring the second one, you get the first one to train them and the process just continues to flow on from there and you start to see more time giving back to you from doing the things that you need to do.

That pretty much hopefully explains everything on how to go about training and also how to give you back more time on managing your virtual staff and also giving you more time to do the things that you want to do as well. Well, thank you so much for watching this video today. I hope that you’ve gained a lot out of it because there’s been a lot of tips and information you have to take away.

What I recommend you do if you want to get started on outsourcing, know where to get some great information and begin finding your first virtual staff, I recommend hopping onto www.MassOutsource.com and there are 10 free videos there which shows you step by step on how to be able to outsource your business and all those videos are all free and complimentary. If you subscribe also to my free report, you’ll also get access to a lot of websites which you have to pay money for normally but with this website, you can get access on them for free and be able to find lots of potential candidates from the Philippines to help grow your business as well. ‘Til I see you next time and enjoy your life!