Jonathan: Today, we have serial entrepreneur and author, Nick Loper, founder of the virtual assistant resource website, VirtualAssistantAssistant.com, and most recently the site, SideHustleNation.com. Today, we’ll be discussing ways we’ve all been burned using virtual assistants, lessons learned, and ways and things that we can do to make our VA experience even better moving forward. So welcome to the show.

Nick: Wow, a serial entrepreneur. Thank you for having me.

Jonathan: So why don’t you tell us a little about yourself and how you got started kind of doing the whole entrepreneur thing?

Nick: My journey in the online world began in my senior year of college with some affiliate marketing. I was doing direct to merchant PPC, as it was known, which may not even be allowed by AdWords anymore. But anyway, it was a decent gig, especially for being in college, trying to earn some beer money, and that’s how I got started.
Eventually after college, like everybody else, I got a real job. I moved from Seattle to the other side of the country, to Washington DC, and didn’t really know everybody. So I had some free time, a lot of free time, nights and weekends, to work on this stuff and that’s kind of where it was like well, if I really want this to scale it’s going to have to be a website instead of just kind of this pass through advertising thing that was tough to scale.

Jonathan: Sure. I like the fact that just kind of off the get go, you were trying to maximize your time. I know personally, I kind of had the entrepreneurial strand in me but it didn’t really kick off until my early thirties, until I read 4-Hour Workweek like not too long ago, three or four years ago. But that’s one common thread I see. It’s folks that are successful entrepreneurs are kind of thinking that. They have the self-discipline and the forward thinking or maybe just the gene to be like, “All right, what can I do?” So how long were you in your first job before you kind of started making a real transition?

Nick: My first, I guess, intro to outsourcing was with building that first website. So I had done some very basic, student-hosted, like in the university servers, website like in Frontpage and stuff, to date myself a little bit. But then the next step was really to have something built out and I knew if I wanted it done the right way, I definitely couldn’t do it myself or I would take years to learn how to figure it out and I didn’t really want to wait that long.
So my first experience with outsourcing was at Guru.com where I found the web developer that eventually built that first site for me. He actually lived really only half an hour away so we were able to meet in person, which is pretty rare for those freelance sites, and kind of hash out the wireframes and the bid for that job. It was a lot of fun.

Jonathan: Cool. So was that one a success then you would say, that first VA experience?

Nick: That one turned out really well and it was probably by dumb luck because I had no idea what I was doing.
Jonathan: Sure.

Nick: So I was really fortunate. Now of course the project took maybe two or three times longer than they said it would but thankfully I did have the foresight to make it a fixed price bid rather than going hourly. Kudos to them for sticking it out and finishing it even though they were making very little on an hourly basis toward the end.

Jonathan: Sure. So just kind of out of the chute, like the first ever project you did wasn’t like, you didn’t start with some small ones and worked your way. You just kind of said I need a website built so let’s go find someone to do it? Is that—?

Nick: Yeah. In looking back, it was a little risky, kind of for an unproven business model where I’d proved it or I tested the concept a little bit with that pay-per-click stuff but really had no idea if it was going to work, having the website as an intermediary. But thankfully, it did work. It was very slow to ramp up but I eventually figured out how to make it work.

Jonathan: So did you have kind of a clear picture of what you wanted the website to do ahead of time or did you kind of like have like a vague notion of what you wanted to do and then you just kind of tweaked it as you went along?
Nick: So it was a comparison shopping site or a comparison shopping engine built on an affiliate model. So it was basically aggregate the data feeds from all of the different stores and kind of spit out a comparison page and kind of the unique selling proposition was coupon integration at the product level, which at the time Price Grabber was attempting to do but they didn’t do it very well and I don’t think they actually calculated it into their price. So that was kind of the big leap for us or kind of the unique selling proposition.

Jonathan: Sure. So you had that in mind going forward, I guess, or initially, on the onset, you kind of had the idea to do it?

Nick: Yeah.

Jonathan: Because I guess kind of where I’m going with that is I know one thing that makes projects more successful is when people kind of have a clear idea of what they want. So it sounds like you at least had that going for you, as opposed to, “I want something” and then the coder kind of took it in some random direction that you didn’t really want to go just because it wasn’t defined.

Nick: Yeah, the problem was with the straight pay-per-click that I was doing was I wanted some way to make sure that I was linking customer to the best deal. It’s required a lot of manual oversight, to constantly be monitoring every product. I was like well, this is just kind of silly. This is kind of a waste of time. This could be essentially automated by a database and a website where I could just drive visitors to that product page and when the prices change, it will automatically update itself. It was a few years before we figured out like actually how to automate all of that so there have definitely been several iterations of that website but it was definitely, God, if you could go back to the way back machine, like that’s the ugliest website in the world. It was a miracle.

Jonathan: Right. Exactly. They always start that way. I don’t know anyone who’s ever said, “Man, I don’t know what it was. The first website I had, it was amazing. It just looked perfect.” I’ve never heard that. Never heard that. So when you had the website coded, though, you still had some manual processes you had to do then and then you just kind of gradually refined it after that initial job?

Nick: Yeah. For me, it was really simply three years of nights and weekends before I felt comfortable to quit my day job and during that time, it was a lot of work like just in maintaining the site because it was with shoes, so kind of footwear inventories constantly turning over with the next season’s products. It was kind of maybe a poor niche selection because of that. It required more maintenance than some other products so the code, I’m sure, by the end of it was just so ugly with like different features that were added, like, “Oh, what if we put this over here?” I’m sure it was just like a quilt work of patched together bug fixes and everything else. But it was functional and it worked.

Jonathan: So did you have the same person working for those three years or did they have like an initial launch and then you found someone else to do the website later on as you refined it? Or how did that play out?

Nick: It’s been the same crew from the beginning and that’s been a really good relationship to have. I think, I don’t know if this was their strategy going in but if it wasn’t this should be a strategy for all freelancers. Bid low upfront and then we’ll get them on all the maintenance.

Jonathan: Right. So did they have an initial project and a fixed price and they gave that to you and then you’re like, “Oh by the way, I need maintenance” and then you had like a recurring fee for that? Is that kind of how—?
Nick: It’s still all been individually bid. Like, “Oh, we want this feature” or “Hey, we want to automate this certain process” so they would each time give a fixed price bid. They also host the sites so they do have some maintenance costs baked into their hosting fee.

Jonathan: Sure. Well, that kind of brings up another characteristic I find is useful is even though initially it sounds like you didn’t spend a lot of upfront time developing the website yourself, once you got the core you were kind of actively engaged and like fighting or with working with the site as you went, right?

Nick: Yes.

Jonathan: Right. So what I see, one thing that could be really helpful and successful is a lot of times people have the temptation of like, “Hey, I don’t want to touch the website. I don’t want to know a thing about it. I just want it to work” and they delegate everything off and they don’t get their hands dirty. But the thing is you have to be involved and there’s a tension between in your business so well that you can understand the problems and then fix them versus just automating the thing. A lot of people just go straight to the automation and if they have a website like you had initially, they take their hands off of it and then it just becomes a train wreck just because they’re not putting the sweat equity that’s required to take it to the next level with outsourcing, if that makes sense.

Nick: Yeah, I think you’re right. There is always the allure of kind of the hands off business model, the passive income, and it’s elusive and kind of a myth when it comes, especially to websites because they’re dynamic. It’s like you hear the people, they’re like, “Oh, my website is almost done,” and “My developer is almost done.” Well, then what? You’re never really done. It’s kind of like a living thing.

Jonathan: Right. It’s like your business. “Hey, my business is done.” What do you mean it’s done? Did you quit?

Nick: And kudos to those people who truly have the hands off, passive businesses. That’s fantastic. I have not been able to achieve that dream yet.

Jonathan: Right. So it sounds like that one was a pretty good success right out of the chute but of course the theme of this podcast are the times that things do not go so well.

Nick: I’m glad you bring that out. So that site went well for a while and then as things started to scale, kind of the performance issues and some other bugs in terms of scale really started to pop up. The site ran reasonably well at 500 visitors a month, a thousand visitors a month, even up to maybe a thousand visitors a day. But trying to push it beyond that, all of a sudden pages would take 30 seconds to load, Just the database, for whatever reason, was not built for speed. It was crazy frustrating. It would be like look, there’s no reason why we can’t get a website to run fast, like every other page on the internet can figure this out. Why can’t we figure this out?

So I got really, really pissed off with my development team that I’ve been with for years and put out bids for people to fix it, like look, we’re going to bulldoze this whole thing. We can’t figure out how to make this work. It’s still kind of a cash cow so we need to figure this out. So we put it out for bid on Elance and that was kind of the start of, I guess, my real education in what outsourcing is like.

So a couple of big mistakes that went down. So the first outfit that I chose for this redesign was out of Minnesota and I figured look, they’re bidding the same as these companies in India. If it’s the same price, I might as well go with the company in America. Those guys bit off way more than they could chew. I don’t know if they were just taking every project they could get or what but it was bad news. They just never responded to emails. They were just super slow, missed deadlines and milestones, and it was my mistake for stringing them on and probably not writing a detailed enough spec to being with but it was ugly.

Jonathan: Now do you think if you would have paid them a higher rate, a rate more commensurate with kind of the going rate in the US, that that would have helped anything, or do you think that was kind of the fact that they bid so low is symptomatic of other thing?

Nick: I don’t know if they just misunderstood the scope of the work or if they were super hungry for the business or what it was but either way, they were bozos.
Jonathan: So do they have any sort of track record on Elance, like with positive reviews and stuff?

Nick: Yeah, so that’s where you can get burned. Even though their portfolio looked good, they still ended up crashing and burning. I don’t think they’re still in business. I think—because it wasn’t just me. I ended up finding out after the fact that several other clients of their’s and even employees, it was like, “Hey, have you heard from the boss?” They’re like, “Yeah, he’s off the grid. We can’t get ahold of him and stuff” so just a really bad situation to begin with.

And with that—this was another mistake that I made—was at the beginning they were like, “Hey, we can”—God, I’m an idiot, right?—“We can knock off a little bit of this fee because Elance takes a cut if you just want to deal with us directly.”
Jonathan: Right.

Nick: Which you find out obviously is super against the Terms of Service but I was dumb enough to fall for it. So it was like I was sold on this guy. We talked on the phone. He put on a good sales pitch for sure.

Jonathan: I’m sorry. Was this the second try on Elance or is this the—?

Nick: This was still the first. This was still a company in Minnesota.

Jonathan: Okay. Got you.

Nick: So I was courted by him. I was falling for him quite hard and it was a big mistake.

Jonathan: So what happened after that? Did you look for someone else or did—?

Nick: So eventually, I cut losses with that guy and it was a few thousand dollars. It was painful. It was more the time that was wasted like okay, now several months later, I’m in the same position I was to begin with. The website is still having these performance issues and it still looks like it was built in 1999 and all this stuff. So I go back to Elance and find another developer. These guys are now in India. The bid is 50% higher and they have experience building a similar site, actually a really similar site. So I figure that if anybody can figure it out, these guys can do it. The design looks beautiful and everything.

But pretty soon it becomes evident that they, too, are not the ones. I think as kind of the takeaway from all this, because we put in milestones and deliverables kind of along the way because it was a $10,000 plus project over the course of several months. So it was like by Week 4, we should have this, by Week 6 we should have this and really after the first missed deadline, you have to cut it off but it’s tough because you’ve already put some money upfront and you’ve kind of invested in it. You have that time investment and the dollar investment. But it’s like if they’re missing milestone number one, this is not going to go well the rest of the time.

Jonathan: Right. I think that’s exactly right. That’s one thing that I kind of was able to learn through experience. Fortunately, it was with smaller projects. But if you work with enough VAs or just kind of in general, just people are offering you a service, you can kind of start to have the sixth sense when these warning flags appear and part of you wants to say, “Hey, we can get through this.” You’ve got the whole risk aversion thing going where you’re already in it X amount of money and you don’t want to deal with the pain of losing, being out that, and stuff. But once you’ve been through it once or twice then it’s a lot easier to spot the next time because you can see the exact same thing happen from someone else. I’ve seen this story and I know how it ends and then that kind of—

Nick: Yeah, it doesn’t end well.

Jonathan: Right, it doesn’t end well so we run.

Nick: Which is tough because even if you get two or three months deep into a thing, they’ve kind of, they’ve got you. The other thing is they can ask for a changeover. “Hey, we underestimated this. This is going to take an extra thousand hours of development time.” So it’s like well, what can you do at that point? You’re already invested in them. You can’t really start from scratch with somebody new. It’s a really tough position to be in. I don’t know the answer. I think maybe the answer is in writing better contracts upfront with maybe some penalty clauses or something. So it’s been a challenge.

Jonathan: Sure. Now do you think something like a test, like small test project—I mean I know you had milestones and stuff but obviously this was a pretty large website to begin with but I’m wondering if you just did something kind of unrelated like, “Hey, just show me you can do X,” that sort of thing, like a complete something would be useful in a situation like that or—?

Nick: I think that would have been a good idea. For this particular one, the main challenge was the data integration and normalization. Or maybe show me some portfolio work that you’ve done with big databases and kind of processing this amount of data on a daily basis. It might be tough to kind of position as a trial for that kind of project but that’s definitely something I do with VA interviews.

Jonathan: Sure. Based on what you’ve learned, how have you changed the way you interview VAs? What are some kind of take homes or things you do now based on your previous experiences?

Nick: So what ended up happening was I ended up going back to the original development team from Guru, kind of a little bit with my tail between my legs to be coming back. But they said, “Okay, we can fix this for you,” which was like where have you been for the past nine months? We can fix this for you. The price has gone up another 50% but a couple of things that were really good, they were like, “We can get this done for you in two months because we know the system. We know how everything works. We’re going to test this new technology,” which I was a little nervous about but it ended up working out, and they put in penalty clauses, like “If we don’t make it by this deadline, you don’t have to pay us.” So I was like okay, that’s fantastic. They ended up delivering and I’ve been really happy with the results ever since.

Jonathan: Awesome.

Nick: But going back to interviewing VAs, it’s definitely asking for trial tasks. With Elance in particular, it’s just the screening process, just weeding out everybody who didn’t even bother to read your application. You can tell almost immediately the people who are professionals about it and who really are interested in the job versus the people who are just blanket applying for everything.
Jonathan: Right. I totally agree. That’s one of those things that just kind of comes with experience. You’ve got to go through some of these things and you get a lay of the land and also the dynamics involved. Especially in coding, you have people, everything from that are like underbidding on purpose, to those that think they can do it but they don’t have the skill set, or they have the wrong skill set, or those that are just incompetent.

There’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that you have to keep track of, especially if it’s not something that you’re an expert on and you’re relying on someone else to do it for you. You might know what you want it to do but you don’t know, if they’re telling you it’s going to take 30 hours or 100 hours, you don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe it’s going to 500. Maybe someone else could do it in 10. How do you gauge that?

I think those are some excellent takeaways. One thing about this story that I particularly like is that even though you went back from them, whenever people use VAs, you’re kind of building your network of folks and you have good experiences and you have bad experiences. But the thing that people tend to forget is once that job is done, a lot of times you still have those relationships. You were able to draw on the relationship that you already had with them so that you could go back to them and they already kind of have the trial of knowledge of knowing how to help you. So you weren’t back to square one. You’d learned some things but you were able to leverage some previous experiences that you had with them and I think it’s great that they kind of were able to pull you back out at the end and kind of helped have a more positive ending.

Nick: Yeah, we were starting with a little bit better field position than straight from zero.

Jonathan: Right. Exactly.

Nick: Going back a little bit to what you were saying about 30 hours versus 100 hours, one thing I’ll do on Elance or on oDesk is just get rid of the outliers, high and low. There’s always this temptation to kind of go with the lowest bidder but a lot of the times, you get what you pay for on the one since but a lot of times the lowest bidder doesn’t know what they’re doing. Either they’re desperate for work, which I guess that’s the exception, when I’ll go for the lowest bidder is when it’s somebody who obviously has a good grasp of the project and he’s like, “Hey, I’m honestly just looking to bid my portfolio,” and kind of that’s why they’re bidding low. If they’re somebody who’s been on the network for a while and they’re still outrageously below everyone else, that’s kind of a red flag.

Jonathan: Right, exactly. That’s one thing that I try and keep in mind is one thing that comes with experience is understanding that just like entrepreneurs have different phases of their business, I’m just starting off, I’m branching off, I’m overwhelmed, I’m a veteran, whatever, VAs are in the same situation. So I’ve had really good luck with people that were way overqualified sometimes and are super cheap just because they’re trying to get their foot in the door. But you have to distinguish between the people that are really qualified and trying to get some traction online versus those that they’re charging a cheap price for a reason. They don’t have the skills, they don’t have the experience and all that.

Sort of like the folks in Minnesota, right, if they had some really amazing knock-it-out-of-the-park stuff that they’ve done and a really strong track record but now they’re moving to the online scene or whatever, okay, but it’s useful to be able to see the warning flags that you can’t make a living off of that hourly wage so that there’s got to be something wrong here if you’re business model isn’t going to work and you don’t have a proven track record. So kind of sniffing those things out and putting yourself in the shoes of the VA to see if they’re in a spot that they’re able to help you is a really useful skill to have as well.

Nick: Yeah. One thing I like to do is try and do my due diligence both in the network and out of the network. So out of the network is just Googling these people. If they have a website listed in their portfolio, trying the contact form on that website, “Hey, how was your experience with so and so?” In the network, looking at—how to say it—the ratio of jobs completed to the ones with reviews. You’ll see if a lot of people are just neglecting to comment, positive or negative, I kind of take that as a red flag because it’s like well, if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.

Jonathan: Exactly. Right.

Nick: And because that shows up on your account record as an Elance employer, too. That kind of is a black mark on you. Well, this guys who lives a negative feedback, like I don’t necessarily want to take his job. So there’s some definitely some great inflation. I think it’s definitely skewed to the positive so the reviews there, take with a grain of salt.

Jonathan: Sure. That’s a great tip. I hadn’t thought of that in those terms but you’re absolutely right. It’s kind of like a bad breakup. A lot of times for both people too level-headed they’re just not going to say anything because it’s going to hurt both parties so that will show up as a job complete without any feedback on either side.

Nick: Yeah. I went to the Elance Work Differently Summit a couple of months ago and I think they said something similar, like if there’s any dispute at all, like feedback is disabled or something so I was like, okay, I guess that makes sense kind of to protect to both parties but it’s less transparent than it might appear to a new employer.

Jonathan: Right Exactly. So if someone was just starting off and trying to dip their toe into outsourcing, trying to help their fledgling business, what advice would you give them as far as outsourcing?

Nick: I would say start small. All of the companies, they want to sell you somebody full time, especially in the Philippines. “Hey, you can get a full-time employee for like crazy cheap” but it’s like you probably don’t need somebody full time especially when you’re starting out. Why not start with one task and kind of get your feet wet with process documentation and just okay, we’re going to automate this one thing, we’re going to outsource this one thing, and kind of ramp up from there versus going all in.

Jonathan: Right. I agree. I think that’s some great advice. So based on what you know now, if you kind of were faced with the situation of having to rebuild your website, how would you approach it differently?

Nick: So if I had to start from scratch, I think the biggest deal in this kind of setting yourself up for success and setting your contractor up for success is just write the most detailed spec imaginable, as detailed as you can and then spend another four days on it. I went through oDesk—I’m pretty new on oDesk. I don’t have a ton of jobs on there—but I was testing him out for the purpose of the Virtual Assistant Assistant site and the guy who actually did the redesign on the site I found on oDesk, and the WordPress theme customization and stuff. He did a really nice job but what ended up happening—and this was like a $150 bid, it was a really, really cheap project—but I ended up spending a ton of time writing detailed specs, like creating screenshots and doing little mock ups in paint, like drawing arrows and being like I want this to be over here, I want this to look like this, this should be on certain pages, this should say this.

Really the time invested there, I think, paid off because the guy finished the thing in just a couple of days and he was really positive about it because it kind of set the expectations. So he was able to make an accurate bid and I was able to get the work done because there weren’t any surprises. He basically just went right down the check list and was like, okay, Page 1 is good, Page 2 is good, Page 3 is good.
Jonathan: Right. You really set the expectation when working with the VA as far as like the level of professionalism so if you just have like a paragraph, “I’m looking for a WordPress thing, looks like this, blah, blah, blah” and then you chat with the guy and you’re like, “Can you do it? I kind of like it.” They start treating you with less respect.

But on the other hand if you started off with a very well specced out thing, then they see the relationship is automatically kind of elevated to a more professional level on both sides and in turn, it really makes it much easier on both sides. I find that it’s more enjoyable and it’s kind of more mutually enjoyable and successful and sets the bar. Because the next time if you have something and you’re in a hurry and you want him to do it, you’re kind of thinking in the back of your mind, “Well, I can’t just throw up just some crap spec” because they’ve seen this other one and they have that expectation. It kind of forces you to keep your quality up as well.

Nick: Yeah, 100%. It makes all the difference in the world. For the bigger projects, that’s the challenge because it’s like you may not technically know how this is supposed to. Like with the giant database, “I kind of want you guys to figure it out. I’m going to defer to your judgment,” so there’s a challenge in doing it for the bigger projects but definitely for the small stuff be super, super detailed.

Jonathan: Sure. That’s absolutely right. The balance between being really specific and diligent in the areas that you know and then deferring and saying, “Hey, I trust your judgment,” that can be really empowering when you can find a VA. Especially I found VAs in Asia that you can kind of run over them and they’re used to that to some extent. Sometimes people just are really demanding and if you just say, “Hey look, you tell me what’s best for this and I trust you,” then it could be really empowering and then they’ll just kind of really excel and do some great work because you’re delegating to them. You’re not just the manager who’s saying, “Do this, this, this.” It’s like, “Hey, we’re kind of a team here. How would you do this? If you have a better idea let me know.”

Nick: Yeah, and one thing as it relates to design, I didn’t really kind of separate it out into elements. I was like just, “I need somebody to build this website” but you think the best developers in the world are not the best designers in the world. That’s why the first website that was built looked like crap, because it was like, “Oh, we know a guy” or whatever and it’s like, well, I guess technically that’s true but his work is pretty ugly. So if you can find even a separate guy just to draw up a spec for it or just wireframe it, just try to make something look nice.

I think Derek Halpern had a post a while back about design. Content is king but design is really king because you have like one and a half seconds or something to, either somebody’s going to look at the website and say, “This is crap” or if they’re impressed with the design, say, “Okay, I’m going to read on.”

Jonathan: Sure. That’s absolutely right. That’s another skill that’s great to learn on a given project, to parse it out into the person that’s doing the graphical design who doesn’t know a thing about coding and the person who’s coding and doesn’t care how it looks, “Just send me the graphics and I’ll make it look that way” type of thing. Yeah, that’s definitely a great skill to develop as well so you can kind of have a team working, a team of experts working, not just one guy who’s trying to do it all.

Nick: Yeah, and Chris Ducker has a post about it, too, the myth about the jack of all trades where it’s like you want to because it’s just simpler, like I just want to have one person to deal with. But it’s like realistically, you’re not going to find somebody who’s the best designer, best developer, best customer service. I kind of liken it to going to a restaurant. If you want Chinese food, you go to a Chinese restaurant. You don’t go to the Cheesecake Factory where they have Chinese food but they also have a million other things.

Jonathan: Right. Exactly. If you go to an international buffet, you’re not going to get the best wings and the best Chinese food and whatever. It’s all going to kind of taste the same and be a little uninspiring.

Nick: Yeah, totally.

Jonathan: So do you have future aspirations for using VAs, coming down the pipe?
Nick: I’d like to. One of the things, I’ve got a survey on the Virtual Assistant Assistant site and each one of them, like if you go there and submit the, it says like, “Want customized recommendations?” or something. So if you fill out that survey, like right now I respond to every one of those and half a dozen people have been like, “Really? You don’t have a VA doing this?” like the ultimate irony.
Jonathan: Yeah, of all sites on the web…

Nick: So I feel kind of bad. Actually, I’ve been trying to set up a if this-then that kind of recipe for it, like if the answers come back like this, send out this response but on the other hand, I like to make the connection with people, too, so there’s trade-offs either way.

Jonathan: Right, there’s the whole crush that idea of you’re just talking to everyone and responding to everything, and there’s the whole four-hour workweek, automate it and just forget about it.

Nick: Right, two completely schools of thought.

Jonathan: Exactly. That’s great. So where can people find you if they want to find out more about what you’re doing?

Nick: My home for all the VA stuff is VirtualAssistantAssistant.com, and there’s a directory and review platform for all the virtual assistant companies. If you’ve used any of them, definitely stop by and leave a review, and if there are any that are missing at the site, definitely let me know and I’ll get them added in there. Then my latest project is called SideHustleNation.com, which is dedicated to all the part-time entrepreneurs out there. That’s how I got my start and that’s how a ton of great businesses got their start. So I’m just trying to build a community around that.
Jonathan: Awesome. I’ve checked it out. It looks really slick, man. Right out of the gate, it looks really professional.

Nick: Thank you. It was designed by VAs.

Jonathan: Awesome. And you also have a podcast now over there? Did I just see you release something today?

Nick: Yeah, so it’s just starting out with a Side Hustle podcast called the Side Hustle Show. I’m definitely looking to connect with other Side Hustle entrepreneurs for that. If that’s you, hit me up and we’ll get you on the show.

Jonathan: Awesome. Well, you have given me some great nuggets for ways to improve the way I work with VAs and honestly, man, just the fact that you spent three years, nights and weekends, plugging away and then you just have kept on and it’s paying off, that’s really inspiring, too. I’m not that far along in my journey yet but hey, it’s super motivating.

Nick: The entrepreneurial road is filled with ups and downs. I wish I could say it was the four-hour workweek. It’s definitely not but I’m very fortunate to be in a position to not have to go and work a real job yet.

Jonathan: Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. I’ll be sure to hit you up on your multiple sites and we’ll be in touch.

Nick: Sounds good, Jonathan. Thanks so much for having me on.

Show Links:

Nick Loper’s Latest Evdevor – Side Hustle Nation www.sidehustlenation.com
Nick Loper’s Virtual Assistant Review Site – www.virtualassistantassistant.com

Different Perspectives on Profit Sharing

For the last couple of months, I’ve had some interesting conversations with some friends of mine. They have an interesting and different perspective than mine concerning wages and how much people deserve to get paid. I have the entrepreneurial mindset that if you’re a business owner and you take all the risk of trying to start a business, once the business gets rolling and gets going then you really deserve the lion’s share of the profits. Those were my thoughts going in.

At the same time, I know some people who don’t really start from the entrepreneurial perspective that kind of look at the corporate world. They have 9 to 5 jobs and as a whole, they make some interesting points about larger businesses, specifically how the profits of larger businesses relate to the amount of profits that the employees have been making historically over time. The argument they make is that if you look from the 1970s until now, the typical American business or businesses on the whole have been making more and more money but wages have not been increasing steadily proportionally to that. So the argument there is that the slice of the pie of the overall profits that goes to the wages of the workers in corporate America, for example, have been diminishing and that’s not fair.

So we’ve had some back and forth discussions on that. Basically, it comes down to some assumptions that you have and some different opinions as far as the nature of what people deserve when they work. Now coming from someone who had a 9 to 5 job and still has a 9 to 5 job, I can relate to both sides of the argument. So it’s kind of interesting when you kind of dig into the questions and the assumptions.

Profit-Based Remuneration

One thing, for example, is when you start asking people how much do they deserve to make for a given a job. The question comes back well, what does someone else in a similar position make? What’s the going rate? For an engineer in a particular area, for instance, it might be $50,000 to $60,000 for a given position. On one side, you can argue that if you have a very profitable company that makes let’s say $20 million in one year and they have 20 employees with each employee making $50,000, that’s a million bucks. They’re only getting 5% of the pie. They’re only getting a thin slice of the overall profits. So some would argue as the company increases in profits, the workers are entitled to more and more money.

The counter to that is if the company made $40 million and they doubled their profits. Would you really double the profits of each individual worker? Would you take them from $50,000 to $100,000? You could argue if you did that, then that kind of brings things out of balance with the going rate of workers. In fact, if the employees were to demand doubling in their salary, the company would just be like, sorry. They would go find other people that would be happy to work for $50,000.

Value-Based Remuneration

The question of course is what do they deserve? When you kind of drill down, it comes down to a couple of underlying assumptions. One of it, when you really look at it is some people assume that someone is entitled to getting paid proportionately to the amount of value they bring to the company. As an entrepreneur, I’ve always thought if the best job security you have is bringing more and more value to a company and basically making yourself indispensable where they cannot afford to lose you, it’s one thing to say you have job security because it would be too painful for them to let you go but it’s another thing to say what is the fair enough of money that you would be entitled to. But I honestly have had not given much thought to it.

As I’ve been mulling that over in my mind, again just kind of in the context of corporate America, some of the thoughts that I’ve had that are just me personally, but I think a lot of people share a similar sentiment that they might not have thought of things in these terms or not, when it comes to a company, it’s not so much, “I deserve a certain percentage of the value that I bring to the company,” it’s just more of just the fact that when you work for a company, they have taken all the risk.

The owner of the company has taken on the risk or a bunch of people have built that company and they developed it to the point in a business’s existence where things can get a lot easier. Then they get to reap the rewards of the hard work that’s been put in place with the business. As a result, there could come a point in time where the owner or owners of the company or the managers get to share more of the profits. I guess you could say the shareholders could get more of the profits.

Points to Ponder in the Wage Dilemma

When you really look at what actually happens in real life, companies get bought and sold. The owner might hand the company down to his descendants or siblings. So in a lot of cases, you have people that end up making a whole bunch of money, that have equity stakes in the company, and they basically just sit around. They don’t do anything or do very little. They just get the money. You might have 100, 1,000, or 10,000 workers that are just bringing value to the company while the owner just kind of sits there and collects it. He might not have necessarily been the one to build up that company to that point.

This point in the discussion is kind of interesting to talk about but I kind of lost interest because it doesn’t apply to me as much in terms of my day to day existence. I’m not going to topple the way that companies operate and that system’s never going to change any time soon. To the extent that it could affect how I view my business as an entrepreneur, I do find it kind of an interesting thought experiment to think about what people are really entitled to.

Again, since I am a 9 to 5 worker, I have a full-time job, I’ve been thinking about that a bit more often. I can kind of see if I were to double my productivity to the company, I wouldn’t necessarily see anything at all in the way of additional compensation. But still I don’t really feel like that’s unjust. I don’t feel like I’m entitled to that. I guess in that sense, the way I look at it is a worker or an employee is not entitled to a set percentage of what they bring in.

Obviously, if you’ve got a guy making minimum wage just eking an existence then things seem out of whack. But again, I think that actually gets to a different issue of when businesses or even individuals cross the line from providing a fair wage to someone to leveraging the influence that they have to take advantage of people. I think that’s when it kind of starts to cross the line. It’s not so much about a certain dollar amount or a certain percentage but if you are using your power and you are treating people in a poor way and they don’t have any other options, I think that is what the problem is.

Virtual Assistant Wages – Getting the Proper Perspective

So when you look at it in terms of virtual assistance, I think that one thing to keep in mind is that you always want to treat people fair. In some countries, $2 to $3 an hour can get you a lot of work done. In the grand scheme of things, I like to or try to as much as I can put myself in the shoes of the virtual assistant. I haven’t traveled a whole lot but I have traveled to countries like India, as I’ve mentioned before. I kind of understand that the cost of living there. These places like that, I can see that if I were to hire someone for a couple of dollars an hour, I think I could get by generally if I were in their shoes because the cost of living is so low in a number of places. Although if you live in a larger city like Delhi or Bangalore, that’s not going to be the case.

In general, I think it’s the sort of thing where the going rate online is kind of reflective of what someone could get by on. That’s just a general guideline but the bottom line is if someone is working for a wage that’s not sustainable, they’re can no longer go to places like oDesk and find work because it’s not going to pay the bills. They’re going to have to find another solution.

Now I know there are exceptions to that and I’m not going to say that’s a hard and fast rule but the way I like to look at things is not so much what’s the least amount I could pay someone or even what’s the going rate for a particular job. I like to think of it in terms of what is a fair wage that I could pay for someone in a way that works for them and also works for me.

The bottom line a lot of times is we simply don’t know. You don’t know that if you’re paying someone $2, $5, or even $10 an hour that that is something that they’re going to be able to live off of. I don’t know the cost of living in all the places of the world. I do know the going rate of particular things on sites like oDesk but I think looking at the question from a little bit different perspective could be helpful, not only to help arrive at a good answer but rather to arrive at a responsible answer.

My Perspective on Reasonable VA Wages

Given the fact that people do apply for jobs and have particular rates, if someone who’s willing to work for a certain amount, even if I think it’s really low, like $2 an hour for example, and I have no idea if that’s a fair rate or not but just in kind of broad strokes see a lot of people applying for a job at that amount, at that rate, then I would have to assume that that is a reasonable sustainable rate to some extent.

Also, I want people to be able to take part in the success of my business. At first, I’m paying them a low rate and I hope part of the reason could be not because I’m trying to squeeze the last dime of profit but because I’m just trying to get more and more work done with the set budget that I can afford. This allows me to get more work done and hopefully, ultimately, make the business more successful, bringing it off the ground and allowing it to grow.

If that is the case, that I am not just hoarding all the savings that I’m making from reduced wages from virtual assistance, then it should also be true that as the business grows, you’ll have more opportunities to increase the wage of your workers. Again, I wouldn’t just raise someone’s rates just because I now have more money so everyone’s going to get more money, but I might do it because I’m being generous, because I’m being nice, or because they’ve helped me along with my business and now they’re more valuable to me. So as I’m making more money and they’re valuable to me, I can reward them. I’d like to reward them with an increase in pay. From a purely selfish reason, you can also think of it as “Hey, if I pay this guy more money, he’s going to stick with me longer. He’s not going to look for more options.”

Again, I think that the trap to avoid is always thinking in terms of what the lowest price I can get is or even what the going rate for a job is. It is good to keep in the back of our minds and always remember that these are people and that you’re paying for their living. They’re not just a name on a computer screen but you’re actually actively impacting people’s lives. It’s a responsibility that also can allow you to be generous, help them out, and provide for their family.

Where I’m at with my business right now is I’m still in the initial stages. I’m still struggling to be able to pay for the expenses of my business and even just break even honestly with a lot of the things that I’m doing because I haven’t, at this point, actively tried to monetize my business. I’m still again trying to grow, build out platforms, squirrel some time away, and I haven’t really focused on revenue generating, finding clients, or things like that. But I have made a lot of friends and a lot of strong relationships in the virtual assistant community. One thing I’m really looking forward to is if and when I’m able to make more and more money and start making a profit with the work I do, then I can reward the people that have been with me all along, the people that have helped me get there. I really look forward to being able to do that. Even at this stage, I still see people all the time and I like to mentor them. I like to give them suggestions.

Allowing VAs Professional Growth

There was a lady who was a really great artist that I ran across. She did some simple things. I had her do some work for a client of mine. I looked at her resume and I realized she’d been working for quite a while. I just said, “Hey, look. You’re charging $3 or $4 an hour when there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make like $6 or $8 an hour. I think you’re kind undercharging.” I just kind of wanted to encourage her to kind of reevaluate what she was doing. I asked her, too, if she was doing this full-time. She wasn’t able to yet although she wants to so that would be one way she could do it full-time, if she’s able to raise her rates and work the same amount or even less hours.

So I just want to encourage folks to not be afraid to go out there and while you’re working with VAs, don’t be afraid that you’re overpaying someone. Don’t try and subconsciously prevent them from moving forward or moving on, even from you. If it’s the best thing for them, once they get some experience with you to find other clients or raise their rate, I would encourage that because I’m just a firm believer that the more you help other people, ultimately the more successful you’re going to be. Again, in business it’s not all about making money. It’s about relationships and helping folks.

I hope that’s some useful information and useful thoughts as far as thinking about the somewhat touchy subject of how much a VA is worth. If you’re a virtual assistant out there and you’re listening to this, I’d love to hear your feedback if you completely disagree with me or if there’s something I missed. I realize that I live in a very wealthy and blessed country and I haven’t had as many opportunities as I would like to travel the world and really understand the cultures and situations of people out there. If you’re an entrepreneur and you have a different view or have some thoughts, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

You can reach me at jonathan@yourfirstvirtualassistant.com. Who knows? If we have an interesting exchange, maybe I’ll have you on the podcast and we can address this conversation again or maybe even have a round table or something and talk about it some more. Maybe there’s some more things that we can all learn from.

Coming Soon

\We’ll be looking at the many different phases in life a virtual assistant can be in and how that can impact and help your business, whether it’s someone just starting off and trying to get their feet wet, they’re a veteran expert with some really high tech credentials, or someone in between. We’ll be looking at how to identify them and how to use them more effectively in your business. In the meantime, make sure you check out YourFirstVirtualAssistant.com/90seconds to see how you can get started hiring your first VA in under 90 seconds. You can send in for my newsletter at YourFirstVirtualAssistant.com/newsletter or you can subscribe on iTunes if you want to get the podcast directly to your Apple-related product, your PC, or Mac. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, remember you’re only a few mouse clicks away from the exciting world of virtual assistance.

The Downside to Outsourcing

While I was driving home the other day from work, there is this interesting story on the radio. It’s about the fashion industry in New York City. They were talking how companies where making choices not to use overseas workers, not to use VAs and the success they are having just using workers locally. They are a small company that was just starting off and they are talking about how beneficial it was to hire someone local in the garment district of New York City. They interviewed a lady who had a 90 million dollar company, and she said that she made so many mistakes upfront because she didn’t know what she was doing in her business. She said that if she tried to use overseas workers, she wouldn’t even be in business today.

Today we’re going to look at the downside of outsourcing. When you should not outsource or shouldn’t use VAs. We’ll talk about some of the barriers that people face and people tend to forget, and the mistakes you can make. We’re going to look at some of the lessons that we can learn as we look at our own businesses. So we don’t make the same mistakes that many people in many businesses seem to make.

Which Side of the Coin Are You?

When people learn about VAs the first time, or when they learn about the industry, they tend to fall into two different categories. One is either very excited about the prospect of inexpensive work, about the many people that are eager to help them out with a wide variety of products, and talents that they may have. Or, they might turn their nose up at the whole idea of outsourcing. They don’t want to use someone who’s not a local. They don’t want to take advantage of people. They don’t want poor quality of work. They don’t want someone who speaks English poorly. They just think it’s not something they want to get involved with personally.

In the fashion industry story that I was listening to, they brought up some interesting points. Number one, it is very important that they have someone local that they can trust. Someone they can ran down the street and get some help from. Not only to help with the quality of work but also in case there is a problem, they know it would be easily fixed. That they (overseas workers) will not just disappear and you’ll not be able to contact them for a couple of weeks and then you’re out of luck holding the bat.
They talked about some of the mistakes they’ve made that they really needed to fix quickly and if they weren’t able to do that, it could threaten the very existence of their business. Things like that we are going to tackle today and see what we can learn from.

Bringing Back Business to US
Some of the companies who are bringing jobs back from overseas include Caterpillar, Ford, Apple and Intel. Caterpillar for example is bringing 1400 jobs back to Georgia, and they site-largely taxes, regulation, government incentive, things like that. Bottom line for them is that you really just have to go where it makes sense. For a time it made sense for them to financially do things overseas but with some of the changes like the financial incentives, it is actually making more sense for them to do the work back in the US. When you look in China for example, there is a prediction that in 2015, in a lot of areas it’s going to have the same cost to have things produced in China as it is here for various markets. Wages have risen 20% recently in China. Shipping cost has doubled and in general it’s just less efficient to get products produced there.
When you look at Apple, which is an interesting example.

It wasn’t too long ago that they were saying that it wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about getting cheap labor. It’s just that they don’t have the infrastructure here in the US to be able to mass produce so many products. They said that they weren’t the engineers, they just have the technical know-how in place and they can’t find people to hire in the US, and so they claim they have to go to China where there are places that have pools of intellectual knowledge and infrastructure to support the massive amount of products that they are creating.

You might recall that there is this issue with Foxcon in China where they had a lot of abuses for the Chinese workers and Apple took a light heat for that and rightly so. In turn if you bought an Apple product you have to ask yourself, do I want to continue to contribute to the plight of some these workers? I think that was another major issue that has come into play for Apple’s recent decision. But given all that there is a lot of common things that whether you are a large company that has been running for a long time, whether you are expanding in these complex software, or design engineering initiatives, whether you’re making billions of products or just a couple of products, there is this roadblock that made it difficult and in fact unwise for them to look overseas for some of the work.

Involving Your VA with Specific Business Practices

One thing that strikes me is that when you are starting off your business. In a lot of ways you don’t have large margin for error. On one hand you’re trying to get done as much as you possibly can but at the same time you don’t want to or you can’t afford to waste your time. You have one shot at this first product and you’re trying to establish credibility and so you need quality, you need good reputation, and you need systems in place to ensure that quality is there if you’re going to hand out some of the work to others. When you start to develop a business and start to develop products or your brand, you start to have a tribal knowledge or certain ways you do things, certain ways that you know because you’re an expert in that or certain things that your company knows. It can be very difficult to communicate that to someone new hire or let alone someone halfway around the world that might not speak your language very well. So the question becomes and sometimes this is overlooked, how do you get the VA to ask you questions if they don’t understand your instructions for instance. You are basically asking them to adapt to your culture of business values.

Your culture assuming that you want your employees to ask you questions and to raise their hand if they don’t understand you. This can be very difficult in some cultures because they don’t want to disappoint you. If you don’t get those things figured out, if you don’t know how to deal with those things, even if you find a VA who’s willing to work with you, it doesn’t make sense for you to hire them. Unless you are willing to spend time to figure those things out. And lest you understand the things that they are going to do shouldn’t be at the critical path at first but they can be more on the support role while you work on the main things in your business. An example would be a mid to large sized software company. They failed because they have this huge project that was difficult to manage. They were struggling for quality control often and they under estimated the level of knowledge as well as the intricacies of the way they code their software, the reasons why they do it this way versus another. And once your people grow larger and larger, you need to have managers. Then you have to make a decision to hire a manager who is local or have it outsourced to other countries. There is pros and cons for both of those and there are downsides for both also which can be difficult to understand or mitigate.

Going back from my original point, what can we take from all these issues that individuals or companies have run into with VA’s. Recently I had some very interesting conversations and I think personally I’ll be making a bit of a shift into some of the things I emphasized. As you know I’m really passionate about finding VA’s and I love working with them and showing people how to find and manage them. But if you look at some of the issues that was discussed here today, it’s not just going to be enough to find that VA. You have to overcome all these other hurdles. You need to figure out how create your system. You need to be able to train the VA or better yet have them pre-trained with the knowledge not just on a particular skill that is needed in your business specifically. Someone who has the skills to help you filter through your emails and help you with the correspondence is an example. That can be a very useful skill and as far as I know there is not a clear name for that in the industry. Your requirements may be slightly different from someone else’s requirements. When you look at it in a broader perspective, individuals or companies need solutions that are turn-key. And if you’re able to get your VA to get in and be a turn-key solution, that is great but there is more than just finding that VA.

Something to Look Forward to

Some of the things that I will talk about in future episodes are more specific ways to use VAs. How to get them trained, how to find VAs like we talked about in last week’s one on one with Chris Ducker. One option is to find someone who does this pre-screening for you to find a VA and if it make sense for you to pay someone to do that, and if you have a lot of work for the VA to do. We will also talk about how to communicate effectively with your VA and how to get them into your business. We will also talk about other ways that your VA can take more active role in helping you instead of you trying to step back while you train them.

That is something that I’m going to be thinking about and discussing a little bit more in the future. As far as, what if there are ways that will not rely on you coming up with a system yourself and not rely on you having the skills to manage your VA personally. Maybe you are not a great manager but you still want to take advantage of VAs. Maybe you want to throw some money at the problem and say that if you have a $100 dollars, it would be worth to get a VA who on day one could do X for my business, instead of, they don’t have the skills to do it now and need you need to show them how to do it specifically for your business. I have talked to a number of people who have said that they would prefer to throw money at the problem and have someone show up in day one and make an impact in their business right away without going through the hassle of hiring them, training them and they can just hit the door running. I think that would be an interesting topic. I think when you have employees whether they are virtual or not, and you can find ways to minimize their scale up time or the amount of time that they can really be effective. I think that could be a powerful thing.

I love to hear your thoughts on VAs and the barriers to using them or ways they can be more effectively used. So if you have any thoughts or experiences. Feel free to share them and post a comment on my website or shoot me an email jonathan@yourfirstvirtualassistant.com or tweet me at yfvajonathan. I would love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening to this episode. It’s a bit of a departure from the feel and some of the topics that I’ve talked about before, at least how I’ve been talking about them. I thought it would be interesting to try something different. Take if from a different angle. I love VAs and I love working with them but I also love getting better and having a realistic view as to what are the needs and what are some of the ways we can all improve in finding, hiring and managing virtual assistants.

Next episode, we will talk about VAs in 3rd world countries. How to find someone at a good rate that you get a lot of work from and also paying them a fair wage. Thanks again for listening.

Today we have Chris Ducker, he’s a serial entrepreneur and founder of Virtual Staff Finder among many other businesses. He currently lives in the Philippines and he offers an excellent service for those of you looking for VA’s.

Let’s start off…

[Jonathan] You have a pretty diverse background and I understand that you didn’t start your career or your businesses in the field of VA’s. I understand that you are doing VA related things but it took you awhile to really plunge into the VA space. What drove you to offer that as a service?

[Chris] You know I’ve been in the Philippines for almost 13 years so I’ve seen the outsourcing industry develop over that time. In the first few years until the last decade, I was doing a lot of consulting work with large call centers and international banks. I would train their staff; mentor their management and that sort of thing. And then what happened in 2005 was, it’s like I had enough making money for other people. A light bulb turned on and so I decided to start making money for myself. I set up my own company which is fundamentally a telemarketing business and is still running today. Back then we work with anyone, small business owners or big corporations but now we only work with medium-sized companies on that side of the business.

In 2008, I saw a big surge of people coming to us for virtual assistance and at that time, we don’t have anything to do with VA business. I have worked with VA’s myself. I have trained hundreds of VA’s at different seminars and conferences. But when the “4-Hour Workweek” came out in 2007, in 2008 we started getting email after email asking for VA’s. We were here in the Philippines and I go online and I look at the few people who talk about working with VA’s but they are on the other side of the world. They don’t have their feet on the floor like we do over here and so we sat down and brainstormed on how we can fill that gap between entrepreneurs looking for good quality VA’s and companies over here in the Philippines that could provide them. They kind of didn’t know what they are doing or they couldn’t find the right people, or they don’t have the recruitment process done properly or whatever the case maybe. And so we put all that into a big pot, mixed it up and came up with Virtual Staff Finder. I mean that’s the short version… we only got 30-40 minutes here but the fact of the matter is, it was a long drawn out process to get to the point where we launched Virtual Staff Finder in 2010.

We did offer VA services in-house for a couple of years and that went well but I could just see myself being able to make more money as a business owner by not offering in-house VA services. So we decided to focus more in finding home based VA’ss through Virtual Staff Finder and that’s what we actually do now. We started 2 years ago with just me and one other person working on the business and now I have an entire team of 14-15 people working on that business and we help an average of about a hundred entrepreneurs a month find their VAs here in the Philippines. The business has blossomed big time.

[Jonathan] So what percentage of those that you vet do you ultimately decide to present to your clients. Is it like a high percentage or low percentage, or has it gotten better and you know what to look for upfront or something…

[Chris] Yeah I think it has gotten better. It is still probably not high as I would like it to be, and the reason behind that is because the work market here has grown quite substantially over the last few years and everybody kind of wants to jump on the bandwagon regardless of what kind of experience they’ve had.  

You probably experience this yourself when you look for a lot of people in Odesk and other places like Freelancer and the like. And they’re great, don’t get me wrong. Those jobsites work, but they tend to work more for the short-term hires or the project based outsourcing, like if you need a website or a logo design or something like that, but if you are looking for a part-time or full-time VA become part of your team, it really does pay to invest the time and the effort to find the right person. But that’s the problem, people don’t have that time. Entrepreneurs like us are a strange breed. We like to think that we’re awesome at what we do across the board but the fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours in a day and our time is our biggest commodity. Once we spend that time, it’s gone forever. So you have to make sure that you spend your time very well and sometimes it just makes sense to  pay someone to help you with something than try and do it all by yourself. In the case of finding VA’s and utilizing Virtual Staff Finder, it’s kind of a no brainer. I would say that in every VA that gets hired, we shortlist three. We present three to our clients, and out of those three, they will hire one. But I’d say to get to that three we probably interview 10-15 VA’s. I think the ultimate reason why it’s not so high, in terms of the number of people we talk to is because we want to make sure that we genuinely get the person that they really need.

It’s not a matter of just going through the process to get the numbers. We would probably have three people to present to our clients after 7 or 8 interviews but we don’t rest on our laurels, we always say, maybe we can find someone better. Let’s do another set of interviews, that sort of thing.

[Jonathan] Now I think that the success of any VA project rests a lot on the ability of the manager or the entrepreneur to successfully manage and communicate with the VA. I heard you mention before that in general, the first couple of projects you have are kind of going to crash and burn because you got to have that experience doing it. What would you recommend someone who never had any experience with VA as their first step in getting their feet wet?

[Chris] Well they just have to get to that point of just trying it out to begin with. Start something simple like getting a logo designed or a landing page developed or have someone build your Facebook cover image or something like that. Start with something very simple that will give you the experience with regards to working from a distance. I think once you’ve done it a handful of times, you become pretty knowledgeable on how things work like the time delay because of the time zones and other things like that.

Sometimes a job that will only take a day will take 2 days or 3 days because of the time zone differences. It’s not that your VA is getting lazy but it is because you are both not physically working on exactly the same time zone and you can’t go backwards and forward on things. I would say, just to begin with, just start with baby steps and build that up over a period of time, until you feel really confident in doing it.

[Jonathan] In general, do you find that you have to manage the entrepreneur’s expectations, like they just read the 4-Hour Workweek and they think they are ready to conquer the world of VA’s and they want three of your best VA’s or whatever. How do you handle that?

[Chris] I think expectation is a dangerous thing in business. I’m a big believer that you can only manage expectation up to a certain degree. I think people know when they are kidding themselves nine times out of ten. I think you have to be upfront with what’s possible and what’s not possible, but ultimately I think that managing someone’s expectation is not really that possible nowadays. I think most people know when they are asking too much too soon.

You see when you’re starting with somebody, let’s say you hired your first fulltime VA, you got to get used to each other first. As an entrepreneur, we are all like “Class A” type of people and we might do a  little micro-managing to begin with. We want something done in a certain way and these things has to be learned by your VA as well. They are not mind readers, so they got to learn those things. It takes a little bit of time for you to get settled with each other but I think after the first month or two working with somebody on a fulltime basis, they should know you pretty good, and if they don’t know you too well, then maybe you need to open up a little bit more and tell them the kind of person that you are.

[Jonathan] You know that brings up a good point about the relational aspect. I think a lot people see VA’s as the means to an end. I know even for myself when I’m working on a project and I’m really busy and I just need to get something done, I’ll shoot an email and I say I need to get this done, and it’s tempting to forget that there is a person on the other end. If you would just take an extra minute to talk with them, it seems to go much smoother rather than just shooting them an email and hoping to get the work back from them quickly.

[Chris] Yeah, any good working relationship is built up over a period of time right? And what you don’t have when you’re working with the VA is the ability to be able to sit face to face in front of somebody and enjoy a cup of coffee. Yes we do Skype and things like that but it’s different. You’ll find that Filipinos in general are quite shy so they are not going to be the ones to open up to you first. It needs to be the other way around.  You can get them to open up by asking open ended questions instead of closed ended ones. I think you are making a point particularly when you get started with somebody, it’s just a matter of time before the first problem will arise and being clear with your tasks and handling it in a right way, not shouting or cursing and all that sort of stuff is very important.

I know that you don’t focus entirely in the Philippines but since I’m here, I should talk about Filipino VA’s right?  Filipinos in general are very conservative, very shy people and because of that, they don’t handle being yelled at or sworn at very well. It would be such a good way to lose a good worker if you get a little crazy on them. It is an interesting journey and it’s something that happens over a period of time. There is no magic pill that you can pop up and it would work perfectly out of the gate.

[Jonathan] I totally agree that the Philippines is an excellent place. I have some of my best VA’s by far coming from the Philippines. I’m definitely a fan of working with folks from there. I think the culture is really open and family-centered would you say?

[Chris] Yeah, very family oriented. In fact I have known several VA’s to literally quit a job because their boss is not forthcoming on the family side of things, like they tend to be too strict on holidays. We have a couple of holidays here such as “All saints day” and “All Souls Day”, the country is 98% Catholic and so you have to respect that they want to visit their dead in the cemetery. You know they don’t just go and put down flowers like what we do in the west when we visit grave sites. They actually hang out and have a party. They’ll bring barbeque and have music and sit there the entire day with their departed ones. You know it’s a big thing here and you got to respect that.

[Jonathan] Chris, you are known for treating your employees very well. Did you make a conscious decision to differentiate yourself that way?

[Chris] Yes I did, from day one. You know, I’ve been here in the Philippines for quite some time and I know how a lot of bosses here treat their staff both foreign and locals. You wouldn’t have thought that Filipino bosses would treat their Filipino staff better because they are Filipinos themselves but they don’t, they are actually some of the worst.  I have actually witnessed local bosses literally throwing staplers at their staff, no kidding! I have witnessed cursing and telling them that they are stupid in front of all their co-workers and those sorts of thing. I’ve seen it all and from day one when I setup my business I said there’s few things that I’m going to do like paying people what they are worth and not a penny less. That I’m always going to pay them on time, and that I’m going to be a nice guy. I don’t want my staff, whether they are virtual or in my facility, to think that I’m a bad guy to work with. I want my staff to stick with me and to talk well about me when I’m not around. They certainly do fear me as their boss, I know that for a fact but that is quite normal for Filipino staff to fear their bosses to a certain degree. I don’t try to be their friend although I’m friendly with them but I don’t hang out with them or anything like that. So I think there is a fine line for any management anywhere in the world.

[Jonathan] I think that is a great principle for an entrepreneur who is working with any VA’s. One should be respectful but also hold your staff accountable not just to be their buddy. And if you need something done, you are not scrambling because they didn’t get the work done because they didn’t think that you are really serious that you needed it on a particular date. But at the same time you don’t have to be a jerk and you can see them as a person and be friendly and be generous with them. I know for myself that that goes a long way when you just have a small project and you know that they are fighting to get it done and at the end of it you just give them a bonus which is to you is not a lot of money but to them it’s huge. I think so many VA’s don’t get treated very well. I wouldn’t say it’s more often than not but it’s not too uncommon so if you treat them with generosity, they will remember that,  they would appreciate that and they would want to work with you again.

[Chris] Yes absolutely. I couldn’t agree more…

[Jonathan] So you talk about the different types of VA’s out there. What are some of the general types that you think an entrepreneur should be aware of?

[Chris] Well, you have the general VA to begin with. Every single entrepreneur should have a general VA. I’m a big believer in that. You know entrepreneurs have this we call, “Superhero” syndrome where we think that we can handle everything. That we are bigger, better and stronger in the entire entrepreneurial universe but that’s not the case. I think a general VA is required for every entrepreneur out there. What general VA’s do is the usual day to day admin stuff for you like the social media, get your blog posts ready for you or post videos to youtube or transcribe a podcast. They can also do your calendar, your travel itineraries for you and things like that.

You will find that the longer they stay with you, the better they become like for the travel itinerary for example. I travel a lot and my VA now knows that when it comes to my travel itinerary that I will not spend any more than two hours as a layover in an airport. I just don’t do it. I hate airports. I appreciate that we have to use them to get to where we need to go to but I dislike them very much. I think they are full of sick people, full of overpriced coffee…you name it. So my VA now knows that when it gets to the point where I can’t get a flight within a two hour period in the airport, I would stay in that city for the night. I will leave the airport and check-in somewhere close by then come back the next day and get my flight.  Well that does not happen often because of the amount of carriers that we have but it still happens and my VA know how to handle it for me.  When my VA puts together a travel itinerary, usually I don’t just go in one city when I travel, I do three or four cities to make good use of the long haul part of the flight, she already knows how I want it done. That’s a perfect example of a general VA.

[Jonathan] Do you give your credit card information to your VA?

[Chris] Yes, my VA has been with me for 5 years now so she knows me very well and I know everything there is to know about her. But you know you brought up a good point about confidentiality in finances and things like that. I would say as a rule of thumb it’s not good to give those kind of sensitive information to your VA, at least if they have been with you for a couple of years and you feel that you are really confident with them. One way to get around that credit card thing is to use a debit card instead of the actual credit card. It is where you load the card up with $500. So  in the worst case scenario, when they screw you up, you’ll only lose $500.  You can also utilize a separate Paypal account if you want your VA to be purchasing stuff for you.

So that’s the general VA, and then you have the web developers which will handle all your web programming, website creating and things like that. You also have SEO VA that helps you be found in Google. You have content writers, graphic designer VA which recently we’ve seen a bit of a surge of video editors and mobile app developers. Mobile app developers are not so popular here in the Philippines right now. There is not that many around so I would suggest that people check out Eastern Europe, there are great mobile app developers out there.  So that’s the general stand of it right there.

[Jonathan] So if someone is using a VA for the first time, do you have any recommendations in putting systems in place or having step by step instructions for a particular thing they want to accomplish.

[Chris] I think that it pays to have some sort of process in place with regards to the task that you want done. So whether you’re going to use project management system like base camp, live desk and the like or whether you’re just working by email, that’s okay too. Audio, video, screen cast, just show them what you want them to do. There’s a lot of different ways to skin that particular cat but I think ultimately, you need to be as clear as you possibly can. Particularly here in the Philippines they have this local term which is “Hiya” which means that they don’t want to embarrass themselves and let their boss down so 9 times out of 10, if they read your instruction and they don’t understand it fully, they wouldn’t want to come back to you and say, “Boss, what’s up with this, I didn’t quite understand this.” They won’t ask for clarification. They will try and figure it out themselves and probably screw up the process. So you have to be very clear on your instructions particularly in the first month or two of working with somebody as they get to know you as a boss.

[Jonathan] That is interesting, I read a book a while back that talks about different cultures in warm climates and cold climate and it even gave an example. I believe it was in India, and I have this happen to me multiple times where your driver will ask someone for directions and you dig a really detailed instruction and then drive for an hour but still not able to arrive at the destination. The problem is that the person answering the question doesn’t want to disappoint you and they want to save face and will not say, I don’t know how to get there so they make something up so they won’t look bad. The way to get around that particular case is to ask someone and you say, “Hey can you ask the guy next to you if he knows how to get to the post office?” In that way, neither one of them knows it but he can come up to you and say, “I’m sorry sir but he doesn’t know how to get there.” In cold climate part of the world, we don’t think twice about saying we don’t know in general.  We tend to overlook the fact that there are cultures that have a whole different mindset and you can be confused or frustrated when you don’t catch that.

[Chris] You are absolutely right…

[Jonathan] When it’s time to go from one VA to multiple VAs. How do you guide someone as far as how many VA’s they should have or is this a sort of thing where when they get their feet wet they will realize over time that they need to get another VA.

[Chris] Well I think there’s really no answer to that particular question. I think you’ll know when you need to start growing the team as your business starts to become more streamlined with the people that you are working with. Ultimately, I think it is important that you literally play by ear and when you get the feel that it’s time to start utilizing more people, that’s where to start pulling the trigger. We usually see a lot of people, about 40-50% of people using Virtual Staff Finder will come back and hire more people. There is usually a 2-3 month gap between each hire when they sort of learned that they can do this or that with another VA.

[Jonathan] One question I get fairly often is, how do I know if my VA is being efficient or is using their time wisely. How do you make sure that your VA is working efficiently?

[Chris] I think you’ll know roughly how long it will take to handle a task. When you provide a task, you should always give them a target time when they need to complete that task. But I think there are tools where you can record screen shots regularly and see if they are working. But you know I would never get one of my VA’s to install such software or plugin because you are fundamentally spying on them and who likes to be spied on? It really comes down to your management skills. If you are working full time with someone, you know that they are going to be at work 8 hours a day for you. Some days it will longer or some days it will be shorter.  You just have to use your best judgment when you are giving them a task.

With regards to how long those tasks are going to take place, sometimes it would just take an hour or sometimes a whole week. I think it was two years ago when I did a big tour in the US. I went to about 7 – 8 different cities in about three weeks. That is a lot of planning in terms of the flights, transfers, hotels and meetings with clients and all the rest of it. It took my VA two weeks to plan that from beginning to end. She did a great job. I didn’t get stranded anywhere and I had lots of business out of that trip. I think that’s a perfect example of making sure that a right amount of time is allotted to each task.

[Jonathan] That’s a good point Chris. You know the spying thing is kind of funny because I once had a VA and the place I was using makes use of the automated recording of the screenshots. This guy had his webcam on as well so in every picture you see him staring at the screen and I’m just like, “This is so wrong” and I had to tell him that I feel like literally spying on him. Why would I even want to see his face while he is studying his screen in deep thought…. I mean, just turn it off….

[Chris] (laughs) You haven’t taken those photos when you are staring at the monitor.. We do some weird faces man! …laughs. You know we do ridiculous things when we’re in deep thought….

[Jonathan] You know one of the first projects I did working with a VA, I wanted to be professional and I found this guy and we’re talking about this Ipad application, laying it all out and I’ve done my homework. We are having this great conversation about how we’re going to specify it. Well, it was really hot that day and I have my shirt off but we’re just chatting on Skype, there is no big deal. But the problem was I needed to share my screen because I need to show him a proof of concept so I pressed a button, the webcam comes on and he sees me sitting there slouched with no shirt on and I’m like mortified and he pretends like nothing happened. It was embarrassing.

[Chris] Yeah that was embarrassing but you know we all had that kind of moment I’m sure.

[Jonathan] Maybe it’s just me but when I do a project that I’m not really familiar with. Sometimes I’m not aware of how long it takes to do like for example doing a web search for a particular thing and I have in my mind that the guy will find a hundred results in two hours. I’m like thinking having a result a minute seems realistic and he gets like 30 results in two hours and I get somewhat frustrated but if I would have taken the time to actually search for the first 3 – 4 myself and I realize that it’s as common as I would have thought, then I set the expectation. I think you need to have a core base of knowledge and understanding of the nature of the task at hand and how complex it is going to be so you know how to manage your expectations and manage their time.

[Chris] Yes I couldn’t agree more.

[Jonathan] Do you have any final recommendations or word of wisdom for the guys or gals who have heard about the VA and is thinking about dipping their toe in.

[Chris] I got more than just final words. I got a task or homework. So this is the task that I give to every audience that I present to when I’m speaking or training, and many said that this is the game-changing part of the entire course.

So here is what needs to be done; sit down with a piece of paper and pen. Then you go and draw two lines down the length of the paper so you get 3 columns. Then you will write the 3 lists to freedom. That is what I call it.  So in the first column, just write down all the things that you hate doing. I mean the tasks that you really despise. They need to be done but it is not what you enjoy doing. That is your first list. The second list is all the things that you can do. Like what I said early on this show, we believe that we entrepreneur are superheroes and we think that we can handle everything perfectly which is not the case. For me personally, it is web development. I’m an entrepreneur not a web developer so I don’t even think about it. I would rather pay someone a thousand bucks to help me build a website or more than that even. I’d rather pay money and have someone else do it in 3 days rather than struggle with it for two weeks.  My time is way more important. So that’s the second list, these are the things that you can do but you can leverage the skill set to other people. The third list is by far the most important list out of the three. The third list is the list of all the things that as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, you feel that you shouldn’t be doing. Like your time could be better spent on other things. Once you’ve got those 3 lists, it will be your blueprint to start outsourcing or working with VAs. Try it. It works!

[Jonathan] Hey, that’s a great actionable item and I certainly hope our listeners take you up on that and provide some feedback as far as how it goes for them. So where can folks find you if they want to get started with more of a fulltime VA.

[Chris] Just hop over to www.virtualstafffinder.com. We have a free ebook which is a salary guide and is another big discussion point. It works out how much you should be paying for your VA’s so it’s been downloaded for over 5000 times. It’s a very popular ebook and you can get that over www.virtualstafffinder.com. And for everything else that I do and I blog a lot about outsourcing and VA’s over at www.chrisducker.com simple as that.

[Jonathan] Great! I appreciate your time today. You have given us great nuggets of wisdom and insight about utilizing VA’s.  Thanks for your time!

[Chris] It was an absolute pleasure to be on this show. 

n this show.

This week I talk about my recent trip to New Media Expo in Las Vegas where I spoke on using Virtual Assistants and met a lot of great people already using Virtual Assistants for their online businesses.

One of the things that I’m struggling to do is trying to find that good balance between how much time I spend on the business, the podcast, and how much time I spend with my family, work, and all the things that typically take up your time. Basically last year I had a lot of things going on, but man! This year started off in an amazing fashion that I’m really looking forward to dig in even more. I was inspired with a lot of the conversations I’ve had and the feedbacks that I’m getting in person while at New Media Expo.

Experiencing the New Media Expo
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at New Media Expo at the Rio in Las Vegas about VA’s. I was in the podcasting track. New Media Expo talks about blogs, web TV, and podcasting. A lot of people were able to converge there. It was such a great time. It was my first time there and in fact, until last year I wasn’t that active in social media to begin with. I’ve done a bit of blogging but I haven’t tried to build a “platform” or anything which involves targeting an audience or reaching out to people that might be interested in my particular niche.

I was pretty new with social media. In fact to tell you how newbie I was, I’m not even knowledgeable about Twitter. So when I got there, someone gave me this tip that if you meet someone, one good thing to do after you spend some time speaking with them is to take a look at their business card and then tweet out, “Hey, I just met Fred (or whoever), and he just told me this amazing tip about how to use “X” tool for this or that.” Doing that is new for me as well as figuring out how to send a tweet and reference someone or how to send a direct message and all those good things. I basically had a crash course in social media while I was there.

It was an amazing time for me. A lot of people there have big following like Pat Flynn, Cliff Ravenscraft and a lot of other people. I was in awe being able to meet them and rub shoulders with them, I witnessed how they interact, how they carry themselves and I figured out what makes them tick. They are successful and they were able to do what they are passionate about and now they have a good following.

I already know that one of the secrets to success is being passionate, being transparent and really just trying to help people. That’s one of my missions with YFVA. I want to help people and become a resource person about getting the most out of VAs. I’m still trying to find out how to “monetize” my niche so to speak. I know this might be a buzz word but I’m not really worried about that right now. It’s something that would be nice eventually and I have a couple of products that I will be releasing this year. But more than anything, when I do that, it’s more just to give me an idea on how you go about doing it, Just to get the experience as opposed to just getting cash flow. Although I think it’s a natural progression. If people think that what you have is of value and is worth their money, they would be happy to pay you for your product or service.

I’ll be doing some of that this year but the bottom line of all this is to provide really good content. I think in the last 12 episodes, I was able to layout the foundational things as far as using VA’s. I have provided good information but I know I can do a lot better. One of my big goals this year that is based on the feedback that I’m getting is to provide step by step valuable content to people so that they can go from not knowing anything about VA’s to getting the most out of them. I actually found out in the New Media Expo that a lot of people heard about VAs and they don’t have any problem using them but they just haven’t gotten around it yet. So hopefully I can motivate people to take that next step and show them the concrete steps on how to do it.

I think this is more of a measured type of approach where I’ll be learning things. I’ll be providing information and value as I can but family is going to come first this year because we have our 3rd child on the way. We have a 3 ½ year old daughter, an almost 2-year old son then Marge, my wife is pregnant with our third child. So I guess I’m going to temper some of my goals with that. My personality is sort of always wanting to go out there and crush it, and be really consumed by things, but in the past I’ve learned that you tend to burn out that way and your family and others can take a real hit. As Dan Miller said, “You borrow from areas of success that you have only for so long.” And I don’t want to borrow too much at this point.

Lessons Learned
Now I want to talk about the things I learned from New Media Expo. I got there on a Saturday and that night, there is about a hundred speakers total and we all get to rub shoulders and meet. I didn’t know hardly everyone because I’m pretty new to the stuff. But I had an excellent time meeting so many speakers. The following day, my main goal was to network with people. I wanted to learn from other people and share my passion for VA’s.

One of the things I realized, from the people that I talked to, is that about 60-70% have heard of VAs and thought of using VA’s. I was expecting a little bit of resistance for people that said they don’t want to take out someone’s job out of the US for instance. That is something you hear sometimes and that’s when I had an opportunity to explain a couple of things like, you can absolutely get VA’s from the US if you want to stay there and that’ s a great way to do it. There are a lot of Americans who can charge you $5 just to get their foot on the door to be able to get future business. But the bigger point that I typically bring out is, a lot of the people that I see benefiting most from VAs are people like me that has a very limited budget at first and don’t have very much time.

Let’s say you have $200 that you can spend on your business or $1000, and you want to get a website up. If you want to pay someone local to setup your website, it might take your entire budget or maybe you can get half of the website because it only costs $35 – $60 an hour, though you have a choice to make. You can either spend all of your money to get someone locally to help you with the website or you can bootstrap that money and find someone who is $5 an hour to help setup your website and 20 hours later you have a decent website for a hundred bucks. You can spend another $50 finding someone for $2 an hour to do some research for you or have a logo done. Basically you can launch your entire business and get a good start for couple hundred dollars.

The first time I used VAs, the whole year I spend over $2000 and I had all sorts of things done. I could have not gotten this far as I did with $2000 without VAs. It really helped me out. But in the big scheme of things, $2000 domestically is not a lot of money. It wouldn’t have gotten me very far.

One of the things that I learned from the individuals I spoke with at new Media who works with a lot of VAs is that he’s like, “Hey, I’ve used VAs for a while.” And then he’s been able to turn the corner and he’s been hiring local college students part time for basically the price of a Filipino worker full time like $500 bucks, he can get someone in the US for maybe halftime who wants to get some experience, especially if it’s a business where your customers are local, and that you need to meet face to face. If you have college student who is looking to get some experience that he’s not going to find anywhere else namely working internationally or as far as working with VAs from around the world in conjunction with other aspects of your business. You can really knock out of the park finding someone locally who can really help your business grow. Then as your business grows you can hire your second worker locally. But none of that is going to be possible until you’re able to get successful on your business by using VAs. That is a good way to start off your business and get from point A to point B a lot quicker.

Anyway a little bit off tangent there but the bottom line is, I really didn’t get that as a concern at all. Even the person that mentioned that they want to hire locally, they were saying it because they want someone who really understands them. They were in New York City and they’re a writer and so they want somebody who really understands their culture and their particular market. It’s true that you can’t find that from someone halfway around the world. You really need someone local but this is more about logistics and effectiveness as opposed to ideological.

Back to my original point, yes 60-70% of the folks I talked have already used VAs or thought of using them before. And I noticed when I spoke to them for a couple of minutes that they didn’t get more excited about it. Part of the New Media expo was a bunch of vendors and they are selling you things like their services and I had multiple conversations where someone would come up and try and sell me service for helping put advertising banners on my website. And after a couple of minutes of them asking what do you do and just trying to make a feel of what my business was and what kind of volume I bring to see if their website is a good fit. I would say things like, “Oh you know I work with VAs.” and then they ask, “What is a VA?” then I would lead in with, “Well, okay so you’re a sales person right?

Yeah. Well you know what, if I was on your shoes right now and I’m at this conference and I’m going to meet a hundred different people. What I would do is I would go hire someone for a couple of dollars an hour then I could have scanned all the business cards and look at all the notes I have from all these people I meet and while you’re in the conference floor, they can be actively searching and writing a contact list for you, they could researching people or have follow up emails ready for you. You can get 50 hours of work for a $100. By the end of the week you could have contacted every single person that came by and if you just convert one more sale and your commission is let’s say $500 bucks, you already have paid for your VA five times over.” And at that point the light would go on and they would say, Oh really! Well can I have your card? And so I got that conversation again and again and I thought that was kind of funny and at the same time that might be an opening for a business opportunity if I focused on trade shows and sales folks, and the like.

It was really encouraging, all the feedback that I’m getting. So that was about 60-70% of the folks there but the other 30% was really interesting because you would run on to people who would say, “Yeah I use VAs all the time.” And I would learn that they use 10 of them or I have a team of 15 people. There was this lady, she was in her mid 60s I believe and she travels around the world and blogs about it. She has videos about it and I looked at her website and it is really well done. I got in a conversation with her about it and she basically has a team of VA’s. She spends a small amount of time creating content and then her team of VA’s goes out and cranks out blog posts, edits videos for her, sends out information on twitter and all sorts of things. So in future episodes, I actually want to bring in some people that have excellent businesses already setup online where they use virtual assistants to help give you guys some inspiration and some ideas as far as how you can use VA’s in your own business. That was really encouraging for me to see other people with amazing businesses use VA’s.

Speaking At The Expo
My talk went really well. It was on a podcast track and so it’s focused a bit on how you use VA’s for creating a podcast which I talked about in the past. But it was also geared towards people that were looking for information on using VA in general. It’s originally going to be an advanced topic but since 60-70% of the folks I’ve spoken with where looking for introductory information, I focused more on using VA’s from step one because I knew that more of the audience there would be interested in that.

So that was a great experience. I wasn’t really nervous until probably an hour before my talk but it was fine. I really enjoyed it. I’ll have a link for my talk that I will post on this website maybe a week from now. They recorded the audio and the slides for my talk as well so I will make that available soon. That was such a great time. I connected with a lot of people that I plan on following up with. And I really look forward to getting additional feedback as far as using VAs and the questions that folks have to start off. For me that was such a great way to start my year and I’m really energized as far as using VAs. Not that I wasn’t before but it really reinforced the passion that I had for VA’s.

Making an Impact
Another thing that I noticed, you know when you’re building a platform and you’re developing something and you start to find your voice or try to find the things that you’re really about. For me it’s the apple method that I talked about before. But another recurring thing that I’ve found, that kind of resonated in me is when I talk to people that have similar backgrounds, I’m really drawn to that and so I think another aspect of my business that’s going to be merging is the fact that VAs Isn’t just about the exchange of money for a service. It’s also about making a real impact in people’s lives. I have travelled India before, multiple times with my wife, she’s a veterinarian and we’ve done mission type of work in the past. And one of the most rewarding thing for me is to really make an impact in people’s lives, people who have nothing. We think that we don’t have much here in US which is true to some people but when you compare that to third world countries, we really have it pretty good here. It is pretty satisfying when I can help out with hiring VAs. Getting to know other people’s families and their backgrounds and developing that relationship. That’s really rewarding to me and that’s something I think I‘ll continue to emphasize in the future.

I know to some people, they don’t really care about that. That’s fine, and maybe even to some people, it’ll turn them off a bit because they are focused on their business. That’s fine too. They are not my target audience. If it annoys you hearing about helping people in third world countries and how it’s a good thing to do and if it does not interest you then my brand and my mission is not the thing for you. Maybe you can find someone else who speaks to the business side that you’re more interested in. But I think my brand is going to be an important element in what I’m about and what my business is about because that’s part of my calling in life. Part of why I’m here is to be an entrepreneur and also make an impact in other people’s lives.

Building a Community
Finally the other thing that inspired me in New Media Expo was how important the community is. I heard people talk about that before saying; you would want to build a community and have an online tribe or that sort of thing. Honestly, when some people say that, it almost seems kind of self serving like they’re just trying to get more money. I know some people definitely aren’t and are really passionate about the community aspect of it but that always rung a little hollow for me when I heard it some places. But having to experience it firsthand, being able to spend time one on one with a lot of like-minded people that are all striving to be entrepreneurs, and be out on social media arena, I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed being able to share my experiences and be encouraged by others who are on a similar quest.

So that’s one thing I look forward to doing, developing a community that is interested in podcasting with my brand and my website. I really look forward to fostering that. Late last year I did a dry run for a bootcamp and there’s just a few of us. I run to some materials on specifics on how you can really go and find some VAs. I really enjoyed the fact that there is just a small group of us that where just getting together with a common cause of trying to learn more about VAs. It was really rewarding and I hope to do more of that in the future. I could really see the benefit of having a community and as it grows, it gets even more powerful because you have even more and more people that you’re able to draw up on. It may not develop all that quickly but that is something in the back of my mind that I’m interested in pursuing.

Coming up Next Week
Stay tune next week where I’m going to have an interview with Chris Ducker who has a number of amazing sites and who’s out in the Philippines right now. He has an amazing business as far as finding people who are interested more in getting full time or part time Filipino workers. I was able to meet Chris in Person over at New Media Expo but actually I recorded that interview prior to meeting him. I just have not rolled out that episode. I look forward to releasing that and I look forward to interacting and answering any questions with the rest of you in the coming weeks or months.

Before we get started, I just wanted to give a shout out to those of you who have made my podcast a 5 star rated podcast on Itunes! Thank you so much for everyone who has been listening to the podcast and for those of you who have rated it and for all the positive feedback that I’ve received. It’s a real encouragement for me. Thanks again!

Today we’ll be talking about how to think like a Virtual Assistant Chess Master, thinking 2-3 steps ahead in each project. Not only hire someone who is a great fit for your current need but someone whom you can integrate into your network and provide you value again and again in the future.

Thinking Multiple Steps in Advance

One of the hallmarks of a chess master or grandmaster is to think multiple steps in advance. They can look way into the future in terms of the game and think well about making this move or that move and know that the opponent will make this and that move. They can really think well about how their current step will impact the whole game. That is the difference between someone who is flying by the seat of their pants and someone who really understand their business.

When it comes to VA, a lot of times it’s just tempting to think, “What do I have in front of me right now? What is a need that I have and who can solve it?” Sometimes we are in a reactive mode and we just feel like we need to have something done. But if we take a step back and be more strategic about it, we can be more proactive. That is actually why I encourage people that even if they don’t have a pressing need to hire a VA, to just go and play a little bit. Go and find something that you could use someone for and learn the ins and outs of hiring a VA. It will allow you to think of ways you can position yourself in the future.

Metaphor of Thinking in Advance

About thinking multiple steps in advance, here is an example of what not to do. This past weekend I got a Fitbit, it is a little device that counts the steps you have and uploads it to a website. It basically tracks your activity. I can be pretty active if I wanted but typically I’m not. So what I did was I challenged one of my co-workers and I said, “You know what, whatever activity you do on Saturday, I will double that.” And I was thinking to my mind that maybe I’ll do like 10-15 thousand steps or do like 20-30 thousand steps. I was doing the math in my head, how many miles I have to run, how active I have to be and all that good stuff. What I failed to see was that on Saturdays, he goes out with his kids and he has lot of activities going on. If I were to look at the trends that is readily available based on the data that he shares because we are friends on this Fitbit website, I would have realized that his activities on Saturdays tends to peak. Not only that but he has done over 20,000-25,000 steps in a day and that means I would need to do 40,000-50,000 to beat him and that honestly was not feasible. That is just an example of how not to think multiple steps in advance. Don’t get into a position where you have to do 50,000 steps in one day to win a bet. But more to the point; don’t metaphorically do that when you are looking for a VA either. Think a little bit in advance so you don’t paint yourself into a corner might be the lesson I learned that I should’ve already known this past week.

The Best is Not Always the Best Choice

One of the things that I like to throw out there is the fact that when you have a given job for a VA. It’s not always the best to find the most qualified person for the job. They might not be the best choice. I know I spend a lot of time talking about how you can find an all-star VA, how you can assess your need, how you can try and look in someone’s profile and look into their background particularly on Odesk and see if they’re good for the job you are trying to do. You know, most of the time that is all good stuff and is the first level of things. If you want to think a little bit more advance, you should think about how can this person help you not just with this job but would they actually be a good fit for you in the future?
When you first start looking for a VA, you’re just like, “Man, I Just want that one guy who has the skills that I need.” And then you feel like having a hard time finding that one person. But as you get used to identifying the job that you have and defining the skill set, you will start to find 5-20 people that are really qualified for what you’re looking to do and you know that any one of them could do the job for you. So the question doesn’t necessarily have to be, which one of these 5-20 people would be the absolute best person to do this job but instead which one of these people has multiple skills that I could apply for other parts of my business or which one of these people could be interested in learning my business or which of these people could I mentor? You would want to start thinking more strategically if you want to really utilize a VA and have them help you take your business to the next level.

The Motorcycle Analogy

I am a big fan of finding a specialist. I like to find someone who is an expert in a particular area. A good orthodox strategy is to be a specialist and not a generalist. I use this motorcycle analogy for an example. Let’s say you want to have your motorcycle fixed and the first place you brought it to said that he can fix motorcycles, automobiles and boats and you thought that yes he might be able to help you but the next guy you ran into says that he only do motorcycles. Your natural inclination is to take it to the motorcycle guy because that is his specialty. Nine times out of ten, that’s the strategy that I would advice when you’re hiring a VA because you know that they excel in that skill and you want someone who can really attack your problem. But in this particular case, when you want to start thinking strategically for your business, you might want to start looking for someone who is not just a specialist but someone who might have other things they can bring to the table. This could be in the form of a lot of things. This could be someone who shows initiative in other areas of their life. This could be shown up by seeing some of the other projects they have done. In general, as you talk with people and look over their profiles, you can get a sense of those people who really take initiative. Those are the people that can potentially have more active role in your business and help you grow your business organically. Once they become familiar with your business and they have skill sets that you don’t have, they could think of different ways of growing your business that you wouldn’t even have thought of. Most importantly, they have the willingness to learn. If you can see that in a VA, it can really pay off.

Letting Your VA Explore Other Areas of Your Business

Let’s focus on some specific examples of how this can happen in the real world. One example would be someone who is a WordPress VA. This is something that I did recently where I had a VA that was very good in that particular skill. Whenever I have a problem with WordPress, I have them do it. I’m in the process of developing a product and I need a landing page that is heavy on sales and marketing and so I’m looking for someone who could do all that stuff. My first inclination is to go out and find someone who is really good in doing that and hire them but then I realized that if I involved my current VA who is good at one area and give him the opportunity to explore this other area. That would have the added benefit when they succeeded then they wouldn’t only be good in one area of my business alone. But I think it goes deeper than that because in this particular case I was thinking that even if they found out that doing this landing page project wasn’t right up their alley. The fact that I’m showing trust in them in another area of my business brings goodwill and instills confidence in them. Honestly, it’s not always about what is the best you can do for your business and how you can get the most out of your VAs, sometimes it is good to give something back to people and show that you trust them.

Another good example of this is when we were looking for someone for our company to do translation work from English to Portuguese. There was a number of people that can do that but one guy stood out not so much because he could translate English to Portuguese but because he had the skill set of professional audio. I’m actually referring to Omar, the VA that I interviewed a couple episodes back who does professional audio. From a strategic standpoint, I know that our company wants to eventually do more marketing and audio work in Brazil and so as a result; this could be a really good skill to have. In this case it would be strategic to develop a relationship with someone to do some translation work and see if that could expand into other areas such as audio editing specifically into the Portuguese Language.

Thinking Ahead in Terms of Pricing

Now let’s think about pricing and let’s use the example of video editing. One of the things that you will find when you’re trying to do multimedia project is that there is a wide variety of prices out there. You will see some people that aren’t very good or just okay and their hourly rate is fairly low like $2-$4 an hour and that is just because that’s what people are willing to pay them. There are others out there that are good but are just starting out and so they start off with a low rate and if you think one step ahead, you will realize that when you do an initial project with them, it will be at a very good low rate but then when you come back to them after 3-6 months, the rate is higher. It is important that you don’t base your future projected cost for multimedia projects on that artificially low rate. Looking one step ahead, you would look at the market and see what the going rate for a good quality person with that skill set is. If you want to look two steps ahead, you might want to go the route other than Odesk where you typically just find someone for a particular project and then come back to them later, track them down and hope their rate doesn’t change. You might want to find a service like what Chris Ducker offers over at virtualstafffinder.com where you can actually hire someone who is more full time and has a fixed rate. If you have something that is going to be repetitive and longer term, it might be better to go that route.

The VA with a PhD

Another great way to look multiple steps in advance is to go and identify someone who is just starting out but has an amazing skill set that you know that you can tap into in the future. I know that in other examples I talk about how you might want to shy away from someone who is starting off with a low rate that will eventually go up because they are trying to penetrate the scene by pricing themselves below the current market value. But in some instances, it is actually beneficial to get a hold of someone like that and work with them because you will be able to network and develop a relationship that you can use in the future. In this case, it is more valuable to have the relationship with them than the work that they do for you. Case and point for that is if you can find someone who has for instance has a Phd degree and they are trying to do a job that is way overkill for them. I have done this and might have mentioned this in previous episodes where I was looking for someone to do some wireless networking information gathering for me and someone with a Phd came in with a super cheap rate. The real reason why I hired him was because I was able to develop a relationship with him and I know I can tap him in the future. These kind of people might go from $2 an hour to even $50 an hour. I’ve seen that happen. The fact that I was able to help them get started in Odesk and treat them right means that I can sometimes chat with them and ask them some questions and they can get back to me right away. Having a contact like that can be an invaluable thing to have. Sometimes Odesk can be a very useful way to go out and find people that have amazing skill set that are looking to be hired. They have a need, they want to get paid and establish themselves. You have a need and you are looking to get something done, in the process you develop a friendship so it’s a win-win situation and that really strengthens your network.

Coming Soon

Next episode, we’re going to cover the 5 biggest fears and obstacles for successfully finding and hiring your first VA and how you can overcome these to start seeing immediate success with VAs. If you’ve been thinking about hiring VAs, you do not want to miss this episode.

There’s been some exciting things happening at YFVA this month – First, I will be speaking at New Media Expo In Las Vegas in January. I will be speaking on how to use VAs for creating Podcasts. Something, not surprisingly, I have had a lot of experience with over the past few months. It’s a real honor and great opportunity. Secondly, I recently was interviewed with a major outsourcing company who wanted to hear more about my story and experiences with Virtual Assistants. I also had a great conversation over Skype with the CEO of yet another major outsourcing company as well.

I realize I have not been able to release my podcast on a weekly basis for the past month or so, due mainly to so much activity going on in the background, including the development of a product (which I’m not ready to announce yet ). I wanted to thank everyone for the support, encouragement, and feedback I have received over the past few months.

Rest assured I’ve got plenty of great podcasts planned for the coming weeks, although I will be releasing it every two weeks instead of weekly as I focus on creating additional content and products that I hope will be an excellent complement to my current podcast, and get into even more detail of specific ways you can find, hire, and manage VAs.

In today’s podcast we have part 2 of my interview with Omar, where we look at the challenges faced both by the VA and employers when trying to find quality VAs in the field of professional audio.

This week we have part 1 of an interview with Audio Professional Omar Barros where we discuss audio editing, and how to manage a successful audio project online with a Virtual Assistant.

Today we’ll be talking about taking the frustration out of Podcasting with VAs – How VAs can take some of the aspects of podcasting to offload some of the work for you and how some of these principles  apply to any type of VA projects you have going on. I will give you behind the scenes look at how I produce this podcast using VAs and I will tell you about some VA case studies that I’ve got in the works. So let’s get started!

Audio Editing – Narration

One of the things I really enjoy doing is working with anything that has to do with audio. Audio means a lot of fun for me. But unfortunately it takes a lot of work. It doesn’t seem like it if you haven’t tried it but believe me; audio multimedia can really eat up a lot of your time. Combine that to editing, researching for the pod cast topic, doing the show notes and editing It to  a blog format can really eat up serious time. That is one of the things I’ve been learning as I’ve gone down to the journey of podcasting.

For me specifically, I don’t have a  ton of time because I have a day job and I have a lot of other things going on. I have my family, I have a 1 ½ year old son and a 2 ½ year old daughter and my wife. They are so important to me and I want to spend a lot of time with them. What this means is that at the end of the week, I really don’t have much time to devote for the podcast so I really have to find creative ways to leverage VAs myself. That is the reason why I decided to do this podcast. I wanted to cover this topic for other people who might be doing podcast and could use a little help and  also to give you a behind the scenes look of some of the things I’ve learned in using VAs for podcasting.

One of the things that is really unique with podcasting is that if you’re looking for a VA to help with the audio editing, you would want someone who is good at narration. It’s not enough just to have someone who is really good at mixing and has a good ear for sound. You really have to find someone that has an ear for natural conversation and are able to tie together a whole bunch of things to make a really good sounding podcast. One thing you might not be aware of is when you hear an interview on the radio for instance; they spend a lot of time trying to make the interviewee and the interviewer sound good so they end up taking out a lot of the “ums” and various other things, noises, pops, destructions and retakes. They basically end up cleaning the audio quite a bit and that is a unique skill set that you’ll need.

Here are some helpful tips for finding good VAs for this kind of project. The principles here can apply to any type of VA project that you have.

1. Break down and understand the specific skills you are looking for. Like in this project “Audio Editing with narration.”
2. Find someone who speaks pretty good English otherwise it would be very hard for them to edit an English speaking narration, general podcast or an interview. They have to know in their mind what’s going to sound good and what’s going to make sense once they start the slicing, dicing and cleaning up the audio itself.
3. When posting a job for editing a podcast, list how long the podcast is going to be to help the VA  understand the scope of the work. Like for instance my podcast is typically 20 to 25 minutes so I put that info in my job description as well.
4. Understand that the VA may be good in audio editing and speaks good English but may not have the specific skills in making a narration sound really smooth. It can be tricky when you try and cut out specific things and know how much to take out and still make the flow natural. So it would be good to start with a sample project wherein you have the VA edit the first few minutes of your audio file and get back with you so you would know if he or she is a good match for your project.
5. Find someone who knows not only the audio basics but also the more advanced audio techniques too. I actually had an experience with a VA that helped me with audio editing couple of weeks ago. The guy seems to be knowledgeable in audio but the problem was, when he sent back the edited audio to me, it just didn’t sound right and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. It sounded like there’s a lot of high pitched hiss on the background. I dug into it and I realized that he has basic skills and that he is not using pro audio tools, just the basic ones and he ended up saving the audio file in 22 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz. As a result, a lot of the high frequency content was lost and when you post process that, like running it through filters, it becomes unusable. You really have to find someone who knows what they are doing.

Audio Editing – Mixing

If your are just looking for someone to do  audio mixing which is a different skill set as well, take note that not all VAs with experience in audio editing can be very good in mixing.  Audio mixing is different from audio editing – narration in a sense that mixing involves having your intro, background music, then you have the narration and the ending. It is having all the levels in check and making the overall audio sound good. If you find someone who has a good music experience and done a lot of recording and has samples of well mixed audio then they could be someone who can really help you with that.

You can actually use multiple audio VAs if you want. This can be useful if you’re trying to setup your podcast levels and you don’t’ quite know what you’re doing. It is always useful to get some fresh ears on what you are doing. You can hire a professional audio editing VA and they can setup the parameters for you like maybe in Adobe. They can also just take your podcast and the associated audio files, mix it for you and send you the finished file back. You can also do it like you’re looking over their shoulder and get to learn some of the tips and tricks that they use as far as getting a good sound for your podcast.

Audio Editing – Fixing

The third type of audio editing VA is one who can really help you in fixing serious issues in your audio like pops, clicks, distortion or serious loss of fidelity for a variety of reasons. There are some plug ins out there that you can play with that will help with those sort of things but sometimes that can be so tricky in cleaning up your audio.  So if you can find someone who has access to high-end pro audio hardware and software that some of the pros in the industry use for audio restoration  then you can really get help in cleaning your audio especially in cases of having  serious audio distortion.

Networking with Audio Editing VAs

It is good if you can easily find someone who can help you in cleaning up your audio when you’re in a hurry or if you’re not having luck with the tools that you have access to. It is good to network with them ahead of time so you can easily have access to them when you need them. Like me for example, whenever I am working with something audio related, it seems like a problem always crop up like between 2am. The later it gets at night, the worse the problem usually is or the longer I put something off, the more likely it will go way wrong. That is actually  the best time to find a VA to help you with it because when its midnight or 2am here in the United States, its just morning in Europe and Asia and so you can jump online right then and have a good shot in finding an audio expert online who can help you out.

YFVA Podcasting – Behind the Scenes

As I have mentioned earlier, I only have limited time in producing my podcast. When you listen to a 20- 30 minute podcast, you might think that it only takes an hour or so to produce it when in reality it takes  4-5 hours to do it. I’m feeling pretty rushed honestly trying to produce the podcast because you really  have to go out of  your way to  research the topic or think through on what you want to say etc. I’ll just walk you through my flow chart to give you a better idea on how long it would take to produce a podcast.

1. Mind mapping – What I typically do first is use mind mapping software to expand my idea in a non-linear spread out type of way. Basically, I just want to map out my ideas because it’s an easy way for me to freely think about the points I want to cover. This can take an hour or longer
2. Outline to an article format – 2^nd thing I do is to convert my finished mind map into an outline and expand the points further. I type that out into a rough article format which helps me develop a framework for my future article and it gives me time to think of  additional ideas or additional points that I might want to expand upon.
3. Once I have the article format, I turn it into another outline that is more advanced and ends up with more points than my original mind map. I use this as my show notes and review it while I talk in my podcast. This helps me bring to the top of my mind the things that I want to talk about.
4. I then record the podcast based on the show notes I prepared and then there would be post editing that takes a while, maybe 1-2 hours for me because there are lots of things I want to clean up and I want to play with the intro, the outro and the levels.
5. Having the podcast transcript written – At this point I would rather have a VA listen to the podcast and outline it for me because I’ve thought through everything, written about it ,re-written about it, talked about it in the podcast and at this point I’m quite tired of going through it 4-5 times. So it’s useful to have someone help me out with it.  I’ve been able to find someone who’s been very helpful with this. I could just send him the podcast and the outline that I did and he could come up an excellent show notes complete with the links and other pertinent information that I mentioned in the podcast.  That has been a great help and for only $5. It’s an excellent value since it saves me 2-3 hours at least.
6. Sometimes I take the show notes, repurpose it and do a blogpost.  I have been writing all my blogpost but I’ve been trying to be a little creative and get some people to do some artwork for me. I haven’t really posted a lot of that on my blog yet but I think that it will add value as my blog posts continue to improve. It’s kind of a fun way to increase the quality of your work to have other people add an extra element that will bump up its quality. .
7. Additionally, sometimes I also have some tweaks that are needed to be done in my site and I have a VA who does an excellent job for that. WordPress and I are not the best of friends. I sometimes struggle with formatting and plug-ins and things like that and so I just have an excellent VA that really helps me out with that.

So these are some the main areas that I’ve been using VAs related to my podcast and my blog. Sometimes it’s not about the time, it’s about the mental effort and anguish related to a project. It’s just not worth the frustration for me to do it even if it won’t take me that long. And just the peace of mind of knowing that I can ask someone to do that and not worry about it anymore can really boost my productivity and reduce my stress level.

Actual Example of Using VAs for Podcast

Here’s a real world example of how I used a VA to really help me produce my podcast. Last week I had an interview with one of my VAs who’s originally from the Philippines but she’s in Saipan right now. She’s an excellent artist and her name is Nhorleen. That’s the first podcast that I’ve done where I was interviewing. I had to push myself because I knew that it would be a bit difficult because I have to figure out how to record on Skype and I’m also concerned that her sound quality might not be as good as mine and that  she is at her house so there might be  background noise like a phone would ring and other interruptions that would require  a lot of editing.

The problem was, I was actually taking off on a Thursday and I was going to be gone all weekend with my brothers-in-law.  As much as I wanted to get the podcast done, I didn’t want to think about it or worry about while in vacation. So what I did was Wednesday night before, I found someone who could edit the podcast for me. They agreed to do it Thursday morning and I was hoping that they could get it done before we take off in the afternoon so I can review it and do some editing as far as the interview portion is concerned. Thursday early afternoon came and it’s time for us to hit the road but it’s taking them longer as expected to finish the podcast. The cool thing was I’ve been at work all day  while they are working at my podcast. What ended up happening was, I got on the road and driving with the family with a minivan. I was checking my email on my phone and I would get an update from them telling me to check out the final edit of my podcast. So by 5 o ‘clock in the evening when It was time to stop for supper, we just jumped to a McDonalds and while feeding the kids I downloaded the audio file through the McDonalds Wifi. Once we took off again  down the road,  my wife drove while and I listened to the audio and made a few tweaks with it. That saved me a ton of time and I just thought that it was awesome that here I was on vacation and I was able to squeeze in an hour or two on the road to put some finishing touches on the narration part of the podcast.

Now in interest of full disclosure, was I able to get the whole thing fully processed, mixed and posted? No, there areas still some additional work I had to do like the intro and the outro and I did not record the audio prior to the interview which I should have done before I left for the trip. But all in all I thought it was pretty cool that I was able to get a VA halfway around the world to help me out and I was able to download it in McDonalds and work in the car while in vacation.

About my Case Studies

I’ve been getting some feedback about my examples like above and other case studies. People have been telling me that they’ve enjoyed the specific case studies. What I really want to do is  continue to have more and more examples with as much information as possible on the detailed  steps that I have taken or others have taken to accomplish a particular job with virtual assistants because I just love being able to show people exactly how they can do it so they would see how easily it is done and they can get excited about it then go out and get their own VA.

I will be posting additional case studies in the future. I will be adding some over the next month about podcasting and you can access it through www.yourfirstvirtualassistant.com/podcasts , as in case study. If you have any suggestions for examples on how to use VAs and some case studies that you would be interested at seeing, shoot me an email at jonathan@yourfirstvirtualassistant.com. Give me your ideas and there’s a good chance that I would make a case study out of it. You’ll get to see it and be able to share it  with other people as well.

Next week I’ve got another VA interview lined up with a Pro Audio expert and musician who does an excellent job in editing podcasts as well as he record his own music. He’s done a lot of work for various TV shows and other great stuff so it should be really interesting. Stay tuned for that.

In YFVA Podcast Episode #7 we discussed the All-Star Virtual Assistants, and in today’s episode, Episode #8 I am interviewing Nhorleen, one of my All-Star Virtual Assistants from Saipan that is an amazing graphic artist. She talks about her experiences on sites such as Odesk and Elance and what it’s like to be a Virtual Assistant.

One of the projects she did for me was a photo editing project. It was a rush job with 24 hour turnaround, and she did an excellent job at a great price. I thought I’d share some of the work she’s done for me – maybe it will motivate you to go out and find your own All-Star VA!

When you have an All-Star Virtual Assistant, it opens up possibilities and projects that you previously were unable to complete.

The Before Picture:

The After Picture:

Note that not only was the background image and clothing color was changed, but the lettering was removed from the first image, and the tiger logo was distorted for a more realistic look as well.

BTW- you can check out her website at http://www.NhorleenBitco.com. No, I don’t get a cut or anything, I just think she rocks!

Today we’re going to start off by talking about what sets an All-Star VA apart from good or even great VAs, go through an example of an All-Star VA I personally use, and then give you 5 tips on how to find an All-Star VA yourself.