Did you know you can hire a
virtual assistant in the Philippines full time for as
little as 400 US dollars a month? We've been working with
virtual assistants in the Philippines for many years. And
in this video, we're going to show you where to find fantastic
people. And we're also going to share with you some of the
things that we've learned along the way. At the end of this
video, we'll also share with you a resource guide that will help
you grow your business. If you want help starting or growing
your freelance or social media management business. Please make
sure to subscribe to this channel and ring the bell to get
notified each week when we post new videos. Hiring a virtual
assistant to help you grow your business is truly a game
changer. I'm going to jump on the computer now with Jeanne
and we're going to share with you what we've done and how you
can do the same. Hey, I'm Kirsten Graham with Six Figure
Business Coaching and like I said I was gonna pop over to the
computer so Jeanne could join us.
So Jeanne, I will let you
introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Jeanne Willson and I have
owned my own marketing agency since 2007. And Kirsten
was actually my business coach way back when when I first got
started. Yeah, we enjoyed working
together so much that we decided to partner and start Six Figure
Business Coaching because Jeanne and I both have the same
passion to help women start and build successful businesses. And
so when we're teaching things, I always like to say, you know,
this isn't theory, Jeanne still owns her marketing agency. So
she's still doing email marketing and social media
marketing and websites for clients.
In fact, the other day,
we were looking at some of the clients that have been with her
and we realized that a couple of them had been with her for a
decade. Makes you feel really old. That's it. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. And so one of the
things that I think really changed your business Jeanne
was when you got to the point where you're ready to hire, and
I feel like this is so typical for business owners, you start
off and you're just scrapping and fighting to get every client
you can you know, your survival mode, and then eventually your
business takes off. And then all of a sudden, you're so busy, you
can't even come up for air. And you've never had to hire people.
And you don't really know what to do about that. And it's
scary, right? It's kind of scary when you hire that first person.
But if you really want a business where you're gonna have
great income, and you're not gonna have to work day in and
day out, hiring and outsourcing is really the way to go.
And
that's why we're excited that you're here with us today,
because that's what we want to talk about. And so I guess we
should kind of jump into it. Yeah, it was just such a relief,
you know, to know that the work that needs to get done was
getting done, and it was getting done well, and it was getting
done in a timely fashion. And, you know, it was just hard to
let go because I wanted to I wanted to do it myself.
I don't
want it to know that it was done well. But you also have to know
that it has to be done, you know in a timely manner and that you
don't have to do everything but there are people out there who
are very capable and then you know, you can Put your last eye
on it, if that makes you feel better to, you know, make sure
that it's going out properly. But you know, it was just
amazing to see how much quicker and how much more work I could
bring in. Because the work was getting done and just how much
more relief I felt just knowing that, you know, once I got done
with my day, I wasn't having to work those hours in the evening
as well. So I like for my kids. Get back with them. Yeah, so a little side note,
Jeanne actually started her business with a toddler and a
newborn.
Right. She didn't want to go back to work back to
corporate what she did with her first daughter. And you know a
little bit about her story. I guess you were in tears, right
cuz you were thinking you had to go back and yeah, I was I I didn't want to go back to
corporate you know, I always have that that entrepreneurial
bug and and when I have my second Daughter I absolutely
said now this you know, I want to be here for them. I want to
see them grow up. I want you I used to cry whenever I left my,
my first daughter at you know, daycare. I just was like, No,
it's not right up but and that was for me, you know, it's not
for everyone. Exactly. I wanted to work from home and I
knew I could do it. Like I knew. I loved graphic design. I love
websites, I loved everything to do with marketing.
I was a
sponge. I couldn't learn enough and I and I said, you know,
now's the time. I'm just gonna we're just gonna do it. Yeah,
with my husband's blessing, you know, I had, like Kirsten said,
a two year old and a newborn. And it was, it was a little
nutty. But I think that speaks to the
fact if you could do it in those circumstances.
You know, we want
to make sure that you understand you can start a build a
successful business. That's what we're here. We're here to
advocate for women to be able to say, look, not only can you do
it, but you're going to have more work life balance. You're
often going to have more income because women still make less
money than men do in corporate. And you get to you get to choose
who you work with and the type of work that you do. And so a
big overview is that Jeannie has a couple of people that work for
Markbeech Marketing, so she has people that do websites. And she
also has people that help with her social media management for
clients, as well as her email marketing. And then for our
business, six figure business coaching. We have a fabulous
video editor. His name is Diaa. So we always like to give him a
shout out. And he's in Egypt to have Jeanne's people are in the US
and one is in the Philippines. And so we were ready to hire
someone else in the Philippines, to be just our assistant just to
help us with our marketing.
In the past. When we hire people,
it's always been to help with client work. But this was a
situation where we wanted to hire someone that would
literally just help us with our branding and our marketing. And
we thought why don't we share this? Why don't we share this
process? You know, because I guess we've been hiring for six
years, but it had been a while, like our last person who's been
with us two and a half years, so we haven't needed to hire. But
when you get back into it, you start remembering all these
things. And we started having conversations. And we thought,
Well, you know, this is something we could teach because
it's really fresh. And so the first thing you do, we want to
start there, right? The first thing you want to do before you
hire someone is you need a job description. You need to know
what you want to hire that person to do. And I like to say
it I tell all my clients this hiring is something that you get
better at right when you first start hiring, you make a lot of
mistakes.
When you're first managing your people, you made a
lot of mistakes. But over time, it's a skill set that you can
learn you can develop and you will get better at it. So for
the person that we're hiring to help us, we list the job as a
social media marketer post and Genie, do you want to talk a
little bit about the tasks we're going to have that person do as
far as part of our job description? Yeah, and and i think One of the
things that we needed to make sure of was that we were really
specific about what we want them to do, you have to remember that
they're typically not going to be part of the the business
strategy, you know, sometimes you want them to think for you,
but actually, they're more like task oriented.
So you want to
make sure that you as the business owner are leading the
strategy and that they are taking that up and and
understanding it, I think it's really important to explain it
to them. But you need to understand that you're you're
driving, you're driving the boat there, and, and you're giving
them specific direction on how to do that. So I do want to add one thing to
that there really quickly, because we have had people that
work for us come up with great ideas. So we're not saying that
the people that you work for aren't capable of thinking or
won't have good ideas because they do.
It's just matter when
you're hiring initially, you really need to know what the
task are, what your expectations are, what deadlines they have to
meet in genius marketing business, she is the only one
that interacts with our clients. She comes up with a strategy,
she decides what's going to be done as far as their marketing
campaigns. And then she has someone on the back end to help
support that doing that making the posts creating the email
newsletters running the ads. So she's not doing the actual work
sometimes, but she is always doing the strategy with her
clients.
And she's always the one accountable for the results
that those strategies get. And so it's the same for our
business, we have to create our strategy, and then hire someone
who's going to support us in doing the tasks that need to get
done. But again, we have had some people who brought you
know, have said, Hey, have you thought about this? And we're
like, oh, yeah, that's a really that's a good idea, or Oh, let's
try that. So the people that we've been so lucky to work with
really do work hard and have, you know, a lot of integrity.
And that's been Really awesome. Yeah, we do encourage that when
we hire them, we say, you know, have a better way to do this, or
you have some ideas that you want to bring to the table, you
know, by all means, you know, tell us, you know, your ideas
and your suggestions, because, you know, sometimes they have
they've done other for other people, and they say, Hey, I
know, different way to do this, or, you know, maybe let's try
this and, you know, just need to let them know you're open to
those things.
Yeah. And I think what we found
though, is they don't always come to us right away, I think
is the relationship builds and they become more confident and
comfortable with us and vice versa, then they're more likely
to bring those ideas to the table and share them. So for
this job description that we're hiring for, you know, we're very
specific. We need someone who understands how to use Click
Funnels, because that's the software we use for our landing
pages and our membership site. We also needed someone who knew
how to use ConvertKit because that's our email software. We
wanted someone who knew Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn,
Pinterest, Twitter, Twitter. Yeah, so we really went through
all the social platforms. And we always say to them, if you don't
know how to use all of these, that's okay, we can teach you,
you know, we don't expect everybody to know everything.
But generally, if you're hiring a social media marketer, they
usually have a good overview of what's going on.
And they will
generally tell you, I am way more familiar with Instagram, or
I'm way more familiar with Facebook, they'll usually let
you know what they have more of an expertise in. But most of
them do have a general knowledge of the other platforms. And what
I love is they're always willing to learn. That's one of the
things that when we take you to the website to show you where we
hire people, they're always saying, I want to learn, I want
to grow, I want to help you build your business, and I'm
willing to take time to learn new things. So the other thing
that we wanted, so we have Click Funnels, we have social media
marketing, and our email software. And so there's two
other things we wanted to make sure they could do like use
Canva for graphic design WordPress, because sometimes we
need them to put blog post on our website.
So they don't have
to know how to design websites, or actually the website
designers or developers, they just need to have an
understanding of how to go into WordPress. And again, every
WordPress has a, there's lots of different themes. So it's not a
problem for Jeanne to teach them, you know, the theme that our
website is on. So those are things, it's hard to hire
someone if you don't know how to train them. So that's the other
thing if you're hiring someone, for example, and you wanted them
to do your blog posts for you, but you have your website person
doing it now, it's gonna be really hard for you to teach
them how to do that. So you're gonna have to make sure that
they already know that and to say, Hey, you know, I actually
have someone else doing that you would be taking it over and make
sure that they're confident that they could do that.
Maybe ask to
see some of their work so that they could show you that they've
done things on WordPress. Yeah, so that's kind of creating that
job description and just listing everything you want. I think one
of the things that we learned in the beginning was it's really
easy to want someone that can do everything right there. He When
they're like us, they can't do everything. So, you know, hiring
someone to do copywriting is very different than hiring a
social media manager or hiring someone to do web development
design is very different than hiring a social media manager.
So don't think you can get one person that just can just do
everything because that's unfair to them, and it's not going to
yield great results for you.
Yeah, you kind of have to
balance the, you want to make sure that you've got someone who
has a creative flair, because you're going to need that for
any of the platforms, you know, if you're because they're going
to have to have some kind of branding and help with with the
design work, which we do actually a lot in Canva, which
is a great design platform, but they're going to have to have a
little bit of an eye for that. But they're also going to have
to understand technology in using like ClickFunnels or
WordPress, so they're going to have to have a little bit of the
technology and the design is going to have a nice balance of
that and a lot of people do now which is great. Yeah. So that'll be our first
tip would be to write a great job description, know exactly
what you want.
And then again, be realistic about what the task
are. Because again, you can't expect someone who can do
bookkeeping and all these different things. So really
target the person. If you're currently running a social media
marketing company, you probably need someone to help you with
your client work and do the social media marketing on the
back end.
And that's what we would highly suggest. So the
second thing is, should you hire someone full time or part time
or project work? So when you're hiring the Philippines, it's
always better in our opinion, to hire someone full time. We like
to have someone that's dedicated to us. They generally, you know,
are on the opposite side of the planet.
So they're working at
night while we're sleeping, which is great. You can assign
tasks at the end of your business day. You wake up in the
morning and those tasks have been done. So that can be
fantastic for you. If you're on eastern time, yes,
Eastern Standard Time, noon Eastern Standard Time, they're
exactly 12 hours ahead at nine o'clock in the evening, our time
it's 9am their time the next day. So, yeah, have a good
balance, actually, because you can assign them tasks at the end
of your day you're going to have for the next morning. Yeah, it's awesome. So we have
been happier hiring people full time. However, we do hire some
project work. One of the people that was with us originally
wanted to be want to do something else, but still
doesn't project work for us. So again, and if you need a
specific thing, like maybe you need some copywriting done, but
you don't need it as a full time job, you can always reach out
and offer project work, but in a position where you're trying to
grow your social media management company, and you've
got lots of clients and you want someone to help with your
marketing and your clients marketing, we would really
suggest a full time person in that position.
Yeah, find somebody who's going
to be committed to you, gonna, you know, give you their their
attention. Who's going to be, you know, committed to you and
your business and your company. And it's going to grow with you.
And understand, you know, the communication is over time gets
better between both of you, they understand more of what you
expect, they understand more about how you know, you work,
they understand, you know, again, strategically what you're
looking for. So, you know, over time, you know, the
relationships get just gets better and stronger. And like
person said earlier, they're more apt to make suggestions,
once they understand a little more about, you know, where your
thought processes and where you're going with, with
different things.
Yeah, what the relationship is
formed. But you know, because we have a, you know, I think I
think we have a fairly good relationship with all of the
people that work with us, and we try to give them lots of
compliments, and we let people know that we don't do this all
on our own. You know, we've had people say, Oh, my gosh, you
guys do so much and it's like, No, we have, we have help. We
could not do all of this on our own to be, you know, just the
impossible.
So out of curiosity, I would love to Are you
interested in hiring someone? Leave us a comment below and let
us know what are you thinking? Would you like to hire someone
full time? Are you looking to outsource? Would you be
comfortable with someone in the Philippines? We just always love
to know what you're thinking. So why don't we jump on over to
the website and we'll show you the website that we use to find
people in the Philippines. And we'll show you a little bit more
detail. Live actually some of the people who are on there and
what we look for and what information you can find. So
here we are. This website is called onlinejobs.ph. And
obviously, the pH is for the Philippines.
So this one is I
think this is a pretty easy one to understand and to use. You
can see on the left hand side it says this is for job seekers,
and on the right is for employers. So you can see it's
even scrolling through some of the resumes that have been
created and on the right Inside it has jobs that have been
posted. So do you want, should we search for someone you want
to just look through? Let's do this. So I love this
website we've hired from different places in the past,
but this is probably my favorite site. So it basically you could
actually go in here and look at resumes and do that for free.
Because they have a free account.
If you want to post an
ad, which is what we just did two days ago, there's pricing up
there where it says pricing, and you just pay for the month. So
it generally just takes a week or so to hire someone. So you're
really only paying for like one month of service. So I really
recommend posting jobs as far as if you do want to hire someone,
you've written that job description, go ahead and pay
for the service, post the job and you'll start getting people
to apply for the job. For one month, you get three
posts, don't you? Yeah, if you pay for one month, you can post
up to three jobs. So for example, right now we just post
A job posts for a social media marketer. However, we do need
someone who can do some contract work for us. And we may want to
have another web developer, if we get really busy again, so
we'd have a backup person. So as soon as we hire our social media
person, we are going to post another ad for a project writer
and also a project website person.
Now we did say
originally, it's better to hire someone full time. And we do
believe that that's actually the best way to go. But we have a
lot of experience in hiring. So we are going to post a job just
for project work for copywriting and cut and also another one for
a website developer. So we have three posts, and so we're just
gonna get the most out of that. Spend if you're gonna spend your
money, you may as well spend it wisely and get as much out of it
as possible.
And even though we don't have website work, right,
the second when we hire that person will have all those their
information will explain to them that will be you know, on an as
needed basis. But this way again, we're taking full
advantage of the three different job posts and just making the
most of them Money I guess, here we are at onlinejobs.ph.
And you can see, I think, actually, Kirsten, you mentioned
the pricing.
Um, so you could, you know, you can look across
the top of the navigation, but if you just wanted to kind of
get an idea of what's out there, you can search. So we searched
for social media marketer. And these are some of the results
that we got. So Kirsten, you can talk a little bit about what? Sure So first of all, you
can just do you need to scroll up a little bit, you'll see that
there's lots of people. So I'll tell you a little bit about it
as she scrolls through a couple and just show you.
Okay, so we
are graphic designer, it doesn't always pull up exactly what
you're looking for. Okay, so this lady right here. You can
see where it says she does data entry online research
specialist. So again, sometimes you put in social media manager,
but the SMM Where it says experience that is telling us
she's a social media manager. Now, you can look at all of this
while you have a free account. And you can even go to View
profile, which we'll do in just a second. But I want to point
out the little thing that says pen. If you're looking through
applications, and you want to start petting some people so
that when you do sign up and you pay for your subscription, you
can go back and contact them, you do need to sign up for the
free account before you can start petting people.
But then
you can start petting them. And then that just means you're
making a list of people you would like to talk to. Because
there are two ways to hire, you could just reach out to people
that you spend one on one and just try to tell them about the
job and then interview them. Or you can actually post a job,
which is what we talked about earlier when we read the job
description and we posted the job. When we first started doing
this in the very beginning years ago.
We would pen people and
then we would start interacting with them. And it was very time
consuming. We very quickly learned it was easier to run an
ad and a lot of people that I had pinned would apply for job.
But if someone really was interested in did not see the
post did not see the job post and they did not apply, I would
then reach out to them one on one. So those are the two ways
that you're going to interact with people.
And that will help
you find the best applicant. So let's go on down, I'm sorry, I think people
who are who are looking for positions may not have their
profile up, they may join to look at what jobs are posted. So
by posting a job, you might find someone who didn't maybe just
hadn't yet filled out their you know, their profile or hadn't
updated it. So you know, it's almost it's a good idea to go
ahead and post your job because then like Kirsten said, not only
do they come to you, but you might find there are different
people who come to you, then what you found. Yeah, that's a very good point.
So let's go up a little bit more and then we'll stop on someone
and open it up.
So you're also looking right here where it
talks about pricing. So they're gonna have the PHP, which is,
you know, obviously their currency. And then they always
have the US dollars. So you know what they're looking for. And
then to the right of that they tell you how many hours they
want to work. So these are the things you're just looking for
overviews as you move through the website. And as you're
looking at different candidates, and you can see that they've
blurred out their names. That's because we're looking at a free
site that we haven't signed up to. So they're not going to tell
you who these people are. Yeah. And I always apologize,
because when I'm looking at the screen and this type of thing,
I'm not looking at the cameras. I'm not looking at you because
I'm busy like reading. So it's always a little more challenging
to do video when you're on screen like this. And you want to talk a little
bit about what Id proof is since that's something that it's not
very self explanatory.
They actually Well, first of
all, I do want to cover that this site has a lot of
resources, a lot of technology and a lot of training within the
site. So one of the things that they do is they will check in
Make sure that the person that you're talking to is who you're
talking to. So they're trying to verify who you're speaking with.
And again, inside the website, there's tons of training, they
talk to you about how to post your job. You know what to
expect how to communicate, they really go into detail about all
the things that the site offers. Like they even offer a time
tracking software that you can use when you hire someone. We
choose not to do that because we like to build a relationship
based on trust and mutual respect. So that's one of the
things that we don't use. But again, the site has a ton of
great tools. Yeah, and the top skills at the
bottom. I think that's something that they select, isn't it? It is it is eventually we'll
open up one of these.
Let's find someone to open up Miss Jeannie.
All right. How about this lady right here. She's a virtual
assistant. She does SEO content writer with WordPress
experience. We were talking about hiring someone before the
$400 price range. And as you can see to the right, it's 40 hours
She says she's got nine years of writing experience. So I don't
see as much about social media management. But we don't know
till we open up her profile.
And what is her? Let's see her proof
rate right there is 81. So not bad. Let's go and open up her
full profile. Sorry, sometimes the slip, like can be slow, but
it takes a while. So that was really awesome. So again, you're
seeing exactly what you saw before. We know she's 40 years
old, she's female. They'll tell us about her education. When she
was last active on the site, how long she's been a member of the
site. This is interesting, where they can write the skill
summary. This is where they can tell you about themselves. It
amazes me because a lot of people do not take advantage of
this space. And I feel like it's really where you don't. It's the
first time that really speaking to you personally and telling
you about their experience. Otherwise, you're just going to
see the stars bye Lo as they tell you kind of what their
skills are. So I always take time to read this. I think this
is probably one of the things that we put a lot of weight on,
as far as when we're looking at people.
Do you agree, Jeanne? Yeah, kind of gives you a little
insight into how they view themselves, how they write what
and how their English writing skills are. Yes. So yeah, it's
it's really helpful to see that. Yes, yes. And then this is where they
can write their skills. So they can kind of tell you what
they're, you know, what they're very proficient with, as far as
skills and software. And there's actually as you move up, there's
actually space between each section of skills where they can
write something else. So again, five years, so we were looking
for someone who had more social media skills, and we're not
seeing that just yet.
So even though we post it for a social
media manager, it pulled up some more creative writing and
emails, and we're just not seeing a ton of her referencing
social Media skills. So, and I don't think they're
allowed to rank themselves five stars for everything, are they?
Yeah. Well, yeah, and not everyone
could be great at everything. So obviously, she has social media
marketing right here. So sometimes it'll break down,
LinkedIn, all of those things. She gave herself a three on
that. But for us, because what we want is someone who's really
strong in social media management. I don't think she's
ideal. I think she's got a lot of other great qualities and
skills for different position, but she wouldn't be someone that
we would consider for our social media marketing. Hire. Not that,
you know, she's quite fabulous at other things. So if she does
have the WordPress, which again, you know, that's one of the
skills we were looking for.
So let's even find someone else. People. Yeah, I mean, when we searched,
we came up with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people
So, you know, there's not a lack of people out there looking for,
like, she refers herself as a social
media manager. So let's Definitely check her out. Again, she has a really great ID
proof score, which means they've been able to, you know, prove
that it's her like, you know, again, they check on all over
social sites, and they're checking out the education and
everything to make sure what she's saying is accurate. So
she's got four years of the blog or virtual assistant and social
media. So yeah, that looks good. She's been working full time. So
looks like she was hired. So yeah, so she's hired in January.
So she may or may not be working. so in this situation,
when I post the job, if she were to apply to the job that we
posted, then I would want to know why she was, you know,
leaving this new job so quickly.
There'll be a little bit of a
concern, but there's a good chance she won't apply because
She hasn't been, she's done with this job. So, so new. However,
if she were someone I really wanted, and she had just taken
the job earlier on, I might still reach out to her, you
know, because again, if she were like, all the skills and all the
things we wanted, I might send her an email and say, Hey, you
know, if you're happy with what you're doing, that's great, but
this is what we have going on, you know, because she may be in
a job, she may have taken something just to pay the bills,
and is not doing what she really wants to do.
So, and again,
she's given us a lot of information here about herself,
which again, really helps to get to know them, other than
just the stars. Yes. So, yeah, she's got she's got a
nice lot of information here. You know, even things like
knowledgeable with Google Docs, you know, our point, Ms.
Outlook, you know, and the software, you know, you can't
assume that that any of these people know you know, those
different basics what we might call basic software's, right.
Really useful.
To know, yes, absolutely. So this is kind
of what we're looking for again. So it's just a matter of
matching up the skills with the the responsibilities that you
want your person to do. And I know this is like a lot of
information. I think, you know, when Jeanne and I actually
teach this in our course, you know, we go into a lot of
details. And we talked about, you know, all the tax forms that
you do, we talked about how to manage them, and you know how to
communicate, it's a lot. But we wanted to give you an idea that
if you're ready to start hiring, they're great people out there.
And because they are in the Philippines, it can be very
affordable for someone who's starting up, because you may be
in a position where you can't afford to hire a full time
person, you know, here in the US, and having this person in
the Philippines will give you an opportunity to grow your
business and then eventually you may have staff here as well.
So
I feel like it's a great way to to get the support that you need
to go out and get more clients to build your business, you
know, to truly earn what you're worth and not have to work
yourself to death. Yeah, yep. Excellent. Any
thoughts on that too? Jeanne? No, I think you you've covered
it all it's it's just you know, having that extra person there
to to take care of things that you no longer need to take care
of. to free you up to bring in that new business and work on
that lead generation or work on you know, those products or work
with more clients is you know, is how you get to that next
level is how you get to that six figure the multiple six figure
the seven, seven figure because you know, you can't do it all
you do need help.
And these are the types of things that that
other people are, are more than happy to do and have a skillset
for. So don't be afraid to let go. And don't be afraid to
outsource and unless someone else, you know, handles some
things for you. Yes, I love that. And I really
love the fact that you know, you're here today and you're
thinking about this. And I know sometimes we look at other
people's businesses, and we think My gosh, how are they
doing that? How are they growing their businesses so quickly? How
do they help help? How can they hire so many? You know, people
are handle so many clients? What's things like this, you
know, and it's one of those things that we didn't know about
hiring in the Philippines until I think we were at a conference.
And we're like, what you can do that.
So you know, it really
opened up our eyes, and then we did more research. And so that's
what we encourage you to do more research and figure out if it's
right for your business. And if you found this video helpful,
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