Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant: When, Where, and How to Do it Right (Greatest Hits)

23:41And we do that intentionally. But we have people on our platform that'll hire a VA for the$500 a month or 800, whatever it is. Our biggest thing is we just don't want turnover. And that's not to say that people are definitely gonna quit if you don't pay them enough. But for us, if a client comes to us and we introduce them to a freelancer, we want the freelancer to only take a rate that they're going to be happy with long-term. And we've just found that, yeah, if someone accepts the 400, whatever it is, if they're not 100 % happy with it, it's not that hard to beat or match or have another client come in and swoop them.

24:14And the last thing we want to do is have that happen to our client base. So we like to say that we're five and up, but if the freelancer is good going below, whether it's$4 or$3, or is good with a fixed monthly rate, They're more than happy to, they're more than welcome to take that rate as long as they're good with it full time. And that rate's not going to be an issue going forward. To bring up that point to illustrate, like this doesn't have to be a budget breaking move in your business. Like you can get somebody competent and qualified really affordably. And that was one thing that was really eye opening to me 10 or 12 years ago as we were just kind of getting started down this path.

24:52And I should add, too, there's a thriving industry of work from home professional assistants and contractors and freelancers in the United States, in Europe, like where salaries,$35,$50 an hour up. So if your budget allows and you need somebody closer to home, you can absolutely go down that path, too. One thing, and this is from Chris Ducker, his advice was to hire for the role and not necessarily the task. whereas a lot of my hires have been for the task. Like, I need you to run this AdWords campaign. I need you to run this live chat customer support. What do you guys think about that quote or that bit of advice to say, okay, you're going to be the customer support manager and in that role, one of your tasks is going to be to manage this customer support, but you have free reign over that kind of division or content area of the business.

25:45Yeah, so I mostly agree with it. I mean, with my customer service reps, It's the same thing. We're hiring them for the role. They're responsible for a lot of different things. It's not like you can only do email support and only understand email support. If you don't understand what's going on in our software or certain questions or able to do live support, you're not going to succeed in that role. Now, we also have other more standard just do this task positions. We have a lead generation process that we use for partnerships and to get on podcasts. And I've been doing the same thing for five plus years.

26:15We have this process down. We hire someone and the only thing they do is that task. And it's much less of a role. It doesn't really build into someone. We actually have had someone who's knocked that role out of the park and we've moved them over to a different role and they've really taken that over. But for the most part, that role is you do it. So I would say 75 % of the stuff that I personally hire for is more of that. This is your role. Grow into the role. Become a rock star at that role. But there's other situations that that might not be necessary, especially as a young startup or maybe a startup that just has their systems really down pat where it's almost that McDonald's style.

26:50You're standing here. You're doing this. And that's what you're responsible for. And someone else is responsible for step B. And someone else is responsible for step C. So I have two situations. One of them is correct and one of them is not. So the situation where you hire for the role or you hire for the task is technical positions. So anything webmaster, programmer, designer, something that requires some technical knowledge, hire them for their skills in that thing. Almost everything else, though, even like a high-end content writer would fall into that technical thing. Almost everything else, I say hire for their English.

27:32Because if someone speaks good English, that means usually it means they think well. That means they'll learn well, you can teach them things well, they can do other things well. And English is one of the things. The second thing that I say hire for is hire for their dedication to details, their attention to details. And then second their reliability like do they show up every single day so if they're paying attention to details and they're reliable like you can teach this person anything you want and their english is less important those are my criteria for like role-based versus whatever because i've found that usually if i find someone and they're good it doesn't matter what they know individually they're going to work on different things just like nate said like you're going to transition into something else because businesses change and i want someone who's smart and who pays attention the details and who shows up every day.

28:25And I can teach her this task and then we can learn another task when business changes. Okay. Well, let's dive into that because I think this is an important next step. It's kind of, okay, now that I've kind of itemized out what I could probably use some help with, and I've gotten some ideas on what that might take, how do you test for reliability before you hire somebody and see if they actually show up every day? Or how do you test for attention to detail before, I guess you could look at their resume for typos and stuff like that. But what goes into your job descriptions for a new hire? Or how are you doing that screening or hiring process, John?

29:06So for me, it's not a matter of job description. It's a matter of what do I do after I communicate with them. I'll just tell you my process. And lots of people have different processes. And there's not a right way, but this is my way. So once I've communicated with someone, I start interviewing them, I will ask them one, two, four questions across five, eight, 15 emails during the recruiting process. In there, I get to see all kinds of stuff. So I would say my recruiting success is probably 80%, where like 80 % of the time I'm finding someone, I'm picking a good person. So when I'm doing this, I'll ask them four questions.

29:48Here's an example. If you answer three of those questions, what are the chances you only do three of the four tasks I ask you to do later? So there's a good attention to detail thing. If I email you and it takes you three days to respond during the recruiting process, what are the chances it's going to take you three days to respond after I've hired you? I recently had one of my people refer me to his brother, who I know is super, super talented. And I started interviewing him and it took him three weeks to respond to me. And I was like, sorry, dude, I'm done. No. Because if you do that during recruiting, chances are really, really high after I hire you, you're going to keep doing that.

30:25So I'm seeing reliability. I'm seeing your communication. I get to see your handling of English. How do you handle English or English slang? It's reasonable to fake your profile, have your friend help you write your profile. It's not reasonable to do that twice a day for five days in emails. What type of questions are you asking in these emails? I will ask everything. Like, where do you live? Who do you live with? How many kids do you have? Are you married? How much do you want to make? What's your past experience? Tell me a situation where you've had something hard and how did you solve it? Why are you the right person for this job?

30:59Show me examples of your work. Write a paragraph telling me that why you're different than other people. I don't want to hear because I'm dedicated and I work hard. I don't want to hear that. Give me something unique. All kinds of random crap. Attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to the next email just to see if they're paying attention. So in that scenario, and I know a lot of employers do this, there's three potential responses. One is they ignore it, which is why I ask it, because they're ignoring a task that I asked them to do that didn't make sense to them. And that's crappy. Two is they attach a picture of a pink Cadillac.

31:30Great. Three is they question you and are like, you asked for this. Why? That's a silly thing. why are you asking for this that's awesome like when i see that i'm like okay sweet you're willing to question me question my authority you know this is going really well and so through this process you're kind of narrowing down the candidates based on who's answering these questions well who's you know asking questions back to you and seeing who kind of stands out and this is all before jumping on like a skype call or a video chat ah no it's not i don't do it so this is philippine specific the reason i don't do it what i have found is that filipinos are scared they're shy and that's what they call it they call themselves shy and really what it is in my experience is they are worried about disappointing you like they're a very pleasing culture and so if they're going to disappoint you or make or they're going to feel embarrassed they'd rather not do the thing at all.

32:33And so getting on a call with you is one of those things where they know that they're going to understand you because they watch American TV and they're fine understanding English. It's they're worried that you're not going to understand them. So I've had like two different situations of this where two of my employees, they were already working for me, they were both super hesitant to get on a call with me. One of them, I could barely understand him. And we had never had a communication issue. But when we got on the phone, it was impossible. He was a programmer, the best programmer I've ever met.

33:05So it didn't really matter, right? The other one, her English was perfect, completely flawless. And she didn't want to get on a call with me because she was so worried. So my point with the not I don't do Skype calls, because what you'll find is and maybe Nate has a different process, but you'll have 10 recruits, you'll ask them to do a Skype call, six of them will schedule it with you, two of them will show up. Where of those 10, you potentially had 10 good recruits. And this isn't for a voice position. So how they speak English doesn't really matter. And you just lost eight of them who potentially could have been really great.

33:38And now you're down to a pool of two because you required a Skype interview. John, I'm really happy you said that. Because I think a lot of people have told me I'm crazy because I won't do any kind of voice calls, any kind of phone calls, Skype calls, Viber calls, whatever, with any of my international staff, really ever. I keep everything on Skype message for a lot of different reasons. But I mean, one of what you just said, most people just don't want to do it. And if it's not a voice position, it doesn't really matter. Not only do I care about the speed of responses to emails, I care about speed to responses to Skype messages.

34:13And that doesn't mean that they need to be available 24 four, seven. But if I'm doing an interview with them and we're both there, we both show up and I'm shooting them messages and it's taking five minutes for a message to come in here and an extra minute and a half here, instead of quick responses, along with the high level English skills that we both value. That's a huge red flag for me as well. It's really surprising to hear that, okay, we'll just hire somebody over this written communication, but it sounds like you've got. Yeah. I mean, most of our communication, our meetings and everything is all written via Skype.

34:44It also just gives them a good way to go back and read things. Everything's in writing. If you need to go back and say, hey, this is what we talked about. I don't know if you've ever tried to get like six Filipinos on a Zoom call or something. Someone always has an internet issue, things drop out, things get misheard. It never goes as planned. So this is interesting. And this is not applied to your first hire. But once you have a team, they'll start doing things. So my team insisted or came to me and asked me, Can we set up a Slack chat so we can chat with each other? Like, sure, great. I don't really participate in it.

35:16All of my communication is asynchronous. I do it through email or I do it... I mean, we use Basecamp. So almost all of it's through Basecamp for project management. So all of the communication is I write a message, they write back when they're available. And sometimes we're on at the same time and I'll find that we're doing it really quickly together. But for most of what we do, and every business is different, where I don't require instant communication. Other businesses will. And yeah, Skype chat's great. we don't do it. And so like the phone call is completely unnecessary. More with Nate and John in just a moment, including common hiring mistakes and when to let a low performer go right after this.

35:52What mistakes do you see people making on your platforms for hiring? Maybe Nate, you can go first. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just setting the expectations right from the beginning. I mean, if you're, I mean, it starts off with just what the communication channel is. Someone might have five different clients and they each have One person likes Slack or Basecamp, another person likes Skype, the other person only likes email. And if you don't take the time to set that expectation up front, a lot of times you'll run into issues. I had a client this week where the freelancer came to me and they were like, I don't know what to do with this client.

36:25I've been messaging them over and over and over. And it turns out the client was waiting for a Slack message and the freelancer had no idea that that's how they were supposed to communicate, even though he got a Slack invite like three weeks ago. So, I mean, setting those expectations is definitely key. What I like to do when I hire people is almost scare them a little bit. Scare is probably not the right word, but I like to set the expectations very high. This is how we communicate. This is who you go to for this. This is what constitutes success, failure. I'll tell them anything that I didn't like from, let's say that I got rid of a customer service rep.

36:56I'll explain why, why it didn't work out, what they were doing. So they have all the information that they need to succeed. And I would much rather have someone back out right at the beginning because they say, you know what? I can't meet those expectations. than for me or my team to invest two or three weeks into someone only to realize that they're not the right fit. Also into that is just personal preferences, any pet peeves that you have. I know for me and my team, one of my pet peeves is if someone messages me, hey, Nate, and unless it's like a friendly thing, but if it's a business thing, and then they wait for me to respond before they tell me what the issue is or why they contacted me to begin with, because there's just a lot of people and that would take forever for me to go back and forth.

37:36And in order for me to get the information I need up front. So one of the things I preach is get me all the information up front so that I can help make a decision or help teach you whatever it is. So really setting those expectations right from the beginning, that's where I think a lot of people go wrong in the hiring process where they just get further and further down the line without being on the same page to begin with. John, what about you as far as mistakes or unhappy customers of online jobs? Yeah, so I see two things. And both of these have to do with exactly what Nate said, expectations.

38:08So number one is trying to hire someone who can do everything. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten an email that said, I need someone who can build my website and make it look really awesome and put up a Facebook fan page for me and change the graphic and then write 15 articles that are really professionally done and do my AdWords marketing and create this custom programming thing. Like, dude, this person doesn't exist. I'm sorry, this is silly. That's one thing. like hiring people with expectations of like this, this is a magical person. There's no such thing. The second big mistake that I see is expecting perfection right from the start.

38:47Like, hey, I hired this person and you didn't do this thing exactly how I told you to do it the first time. And so you're fired. So what I've seen over the years often is like, I provided them perfect instructions. Look. And when I look at the instructions, I'm like, dude, I don't even know what you want. So your instructions suck. But you think that your instructions are perfect, and you expected them to do it perfectly, and you had zero tolerance for this, and you fired them. That's usually the mistake. This isn't a magic bullet. It doesn't solve things overnight. You have to work at it. You have to create a relationship with the people you're hiring.

39:24It takes time. John, one of my personal favorites is when someone messages a VA, and their only instructions are, find me profitable products on Amazon. That's it. Nothing else. And then they'll hire the VA for five hours and then they'll dispute it and they'll say, oh, this person didn't find me any profitable products. And I have a whole can of response for it and that. But you're absolutely right. I mean, you're only as good as your directions and your instructions and that perfect person that does everything. You don't even want to hire that person. Let's say best case scenario, you hire a perfect person that can do all these different tasks for your business.

39:55If that person gets sick and that person quits on you, you're never finding a second one that's going to be exactly the same. So I think a lot of business owners need to get out of that mentality as well. Yeah. Or like, build me a website. Like, what? No, that's not. No, there's so much thinking that goes on. And that's probably the other side of it is, and this goes way back to the very beginning. When is it time to hire someone? Don't hire someone expecting them to take over and run your business or to build your business for you. You should know what you're doing in your business before you hire someone.

40:27Like, you should have a reason you're hiring this person and know what they're going to do. and it's the same thing for like build me a website you should know what is going into this website or at least you should be willing to think through it and work with them through the issues like hey i like this from this website here's why i want it on my website put it here stuff like that because the build me a website doesn't work well on the flip side of that when is it time to say like this is just not working out like this person is not communicating well they're not meeting expectations. Like we've been through this training three or four times and it's just like, they're not getting it.

41:03Like we ever had to let somebody go who just wasn't performing? I mean, I definitely have. I don't think anyone has a 100 % hiring record. It doesn't, doesn't exist. For me, it's all about how much investment did I make into this person? If I'm on week one and they're not showing up on time and they're not grasping it, I'm probably pretty quick to part ties. Now, I've also had a situation where I had a bookkeeper for two years and he was an absolute rock star. And all of a sudden he started making mistakes and not following directions. And I sat down and I met with him and I tried to get to the bottom of what was going on.

41:35And I'm really happy I didn't fire him because it turns out that he was just burnt out from busy season and he needed a week and a half off and he came back and he's been crushing it ever since. So for me, I kind of look at how much time I've invested. I also try to focus on what I can control. If I hire three VAs and all three of them can't follow my SOPs and are all struggling, I probably need to take a look at my SOPs and how I'm communicating it and how I'm teaching it. So there's different factors there. I think we've all heard the fire fast, hire slow. It's kind of the same thing. It all depends on how much time and money you've invested into someone, but you also don't want to get caught up, hey, I've invested a month into someone, so I'm not going to part ways.

42:15And then you end up two months in and they're still not doing what you want. So it's kind of a fine line and a balancing act. And it's hard. Firing sucks no matter where you are. So for me, when something's not going right, especially in the Philippines, the first question is, what are you stuck on to that person? Because I mean, I've had the exact same experience that Nate has had. I have this amazing programmer, and he's been so dang good for so long and then he stopped working for like a month and i i'm the type where i just want people to work and i don't want to think about it and it took takes me a while to realize something's not going on so i approached him and said what's going on with you i was like dude what if he's not working i'm gonna let him go but i said what's going on with you and it turns out he was like i'm so sorry sir i i have this major eye problem where if i look at the computer for more than an hour straight.

43:10I can't see. I go blind. Like, oh, crap, that sucks. Yeah, like, hey, how can I help you work through this? He was like, well, I need this medicine and it's hard to get and it's really expensive. Like, sweet, let me help you buy this medicine so you get back to work. And he's back to work. And awesome. But there is a thing of patience there of like trying to work through issues where a lot of people just aren't willing to do it. If you're not willing to do it, if you're hard for you. Now, that seems exceptionally common where, oh, my wife's brother is in the hospital or there was a typhoon, which I guess you could verify, or the internet was out, or you just, you kind of get ghosted in certain situations and you're like, what, was it something that I did?

43:58Like, is this legit? And you're halfway around the world, you're trying to figure out, okay, is this person just trying to get more money out of me? Why did they all of a sudden stop working? It can be kind of a frustrating situation. Like, have you ever had that happen where it's like, had you not been proactive about asking him like, hey, what's going on with you? Like, you might never have found out. Or do you get these kind of sob stories? And I don't know, it's hard to know what's the truth. Yes, we all get them. Nate, how do you deal with it? Yeah, we definitely all get them. I mean, part of what we do that I think is that we do well is we almost set the expectation If you're going to get on the free up platform, not working for me, just offering your services in general, never mind on my internal team, the communication is everything.

44:42If you're not communicating with clients, if the clients have to chase you, if my team has to stop what they're doing to reach out to you and reach out to your emergency contact, you're going to get blocked from getting more clients from us. And we'll make it right with the client, but that's it. So we all go through personal issues. I know Philippines, people in the Philippines sometimes get a bad rap for different things, whether it's they have an extended family or they've got power outages or stuff like that. But we really set the expectation that, listen, if you're supposed to work and you lose power, the expectation is you communicate it up front to the client and you go somewhere where there's internet.

45:16And if you can't, you let us know. And having strong internet, strong power is a bare minimum requirement to offer your services on the free up platform. So we kind of set those expectations. I mean, if someone from my team just disappears for a week, most likely they're not going to continue working with me. I mean, we just can't have people that are just going to completely drop off the face of the earth with absolutely no communication. At the end of the day, what are you going to do? I mean, we have people's emergency contact information. We've got if someone referred them to the platform, we can contact their referral.

45:47But if someone disappears, I'm not going to go to the Philippines and chase them down. Or I have this piece of paper, a legal agreement. None of that's going to happen. There's only so much you can do. And we consider ourselves as pretty reasonable people. If you have a personal issue, if something's going on, let us know. We're going to problem solve and see if there's a way to work around it. But if you're not going to communicate it up front, then there's not much we can do to help you. Do you put a contract in place to say, like, OK, here's the expected hours. Here's your payment terms. Here's what I do.

46:19Spell that out up front. So we have the terms of use of being on our platform, which is different. If you're talking about my internal team, then no, I mean, we've got our, so what I do is I lay out the expectations. It's not a contract, but I have it all in writing and I'll, I'll have them write, I confirm, or I agree to everything as we go down. So if there's ever a question of, did we agree to this? Or you're supposed to do this? We have this conversation that we can go back to. And it's like, Hey, you, you agreed to this. I mean, again, what am I going to do with a legal agreement with someone in the Philippines.

46:50I'm never going to enforce that at the end of the day, but John might have a different point. I love it because I get this question all the time too. Where's the contract? No, you're not going to enforce a contract. No. Off of that, I had a funny situation where I had this client who, she wasn't happy with this bookkeeping work. I knew this bookkeeper. This bookkeeper has been awesome. He's been in the platform for a while, tons of really happy clients. And we paid out the bookkeeper and the client came back and she wasn't happy with the work. It was like$400 or something like that. So I refunded the client, no big deal.

47:26The freelancer was happy. He had other clients. I checked in with them. They were all happy. But the client came back to me and he was like, I don't want you to pay for this. I want you to get the money from the freelancer and pay me from the freelancer. And he was like, don't you have these legal agreements? Can't you enforce this? And I tried to tell her in the nicest way possible that I wasn't going to force this guy to send me$400, that I wasn't going to hire a Filipino lawyer to go after him. Like none of that was realistic in any way. And John, I'm sure you get very similar stories. Yeah.

47:59And usually we're like you. I mean, we're trying to be nice about it, but in the end we just say, go away. No, this is up to you to work this out. Fair enough. Fair enough. Anything else to add on this dipping your toe into the outsourcing waters before we wrap up? I'm a big fan of experimenting. Right now, I'm building a biz dev team to handle partnerships. And I don't have an exact SOP. I probably wouldn't have done this back in the day when I was hiring people for the first time. But I know the type of person that I want. And once I hire them, I'm going to give it a few months. And I'm going to experiment and try different things and find someone that I actually work with and collaborate with.

48:38And that's a more advanced thing. I definitely wouldn't recommend it. But don't get in the mentality that you can only hire someone if you have an ABCDE process. Yeah, it's strongly recommended, but there's a time and place in your business to experiment with different things. And I'm a big fan of low risk, high reward situations. If I hire someone to run my Instagram for three months, what's the worst case scenario? I lose a few hundred dollars. And what's the best case scenario is it starts up a brand new revenue source and build a presence there. And don't be afraid to experiment and try new things as long as you're in the mentality that some things work and some things don't.

49:14Nate and I are so similar. My thing with this is, look, you don't know if this works for you until you try it. You got to give it a try. And it takes a leap. If you're working 50 hours a week, plan on working 55 hours a week for a couple of weeks. It's just part of it. But then if it works for you, the reward is time. If it doesn't work for you, you're out a couple hundred bucks, right? It's not that big of a deal. But to know if it's going to work for you, you got to try it. You have to do something. You have to take a leap. Yeah, I think the bigger risk is aside from the time and the money, you know, in my case, it was opening the doors to the kingdom.

49:49It was like, okay, here's the AdWords account. I mean, you could do some serious damage in there if you don't follow directions or you, I don't know, change the password or lock out the credit card information or something. And or it's like, okay, I'm going to bring somebody in to manage my inbox. It's like, there's some potentially sensitive information. So there's like, there's the time and money risk, but there's like the business and security and like personal trust risk that can be hard to get over as well. So kind of like that framing it as like an experiment, like low risk, high reward hires.

50:23And we should point out that like people aren't out to screw you over. The vast majority of people, like they're looking for honest work and they want to do a good job and they want to have something that can support them and their family for a long term. But it is this leap to get over to like, especially if it's your first time delegating to say, okay, now somebody else is gonna take over this for me. Freeup.com, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com, freelance hiring marketplace and onlinejobs.ph for hires in the Philippines. And hey, we should add too, like, you know, not just Philippines, but you can hire people from all over on FreeUp.

50:59So let's wrap this thing up with your guys. Number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Doesn't have to be outsourcing related or virtual assistant related. Just whatever entrepreneurial wisdom you'd like to impart. And we'll let John kick this one off. So what I found over the years is the thing that separates successful entrepreneurs from those that are not is the willingness to think. The willingness to think through hard things because business is hard. It's not just tell me what to do and I'll do it. That's not how you run a business. You have to be willing to think through problems and create solutions.

51:31And that's where the hard work is. The hard work isn't in, oh, I work 80 hours a week. The hard work is in being willing to think effectively and create solutions. Yeah, I completely agree with that. The thing I would add, kind of a separate tip, is just being able to prioritize. It's such an underrated skill as an entrepreneur. You've got a million things you can do, all these different things you can tackle. You can go after every social media channel. You've got to figure out what comes first, what comes second, what comes third. when a new idea comes up, you have to figure out where that slides in.

51:59And the best entrepreneurs just know how to prioritize and kind of goes hand in hand with hiring. You have to know what order to hire people, what order to get projects done. And a lot of times that's the difference between success and failure. Absolutely. The willingness to think through hard things. What do you mean? This is going to be hard? You know, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it right. And then the prioritization skill is absolutely critical, both on this hiring front and just in the broader business and life sense. Like, hey, you vote your time with your priorities. Hey, I didn't have enough time to get that done.

52:30Be honest with yourself. You prioritized something else for better or worse. John and Nate really appreciate you guys joining me and we'll catch up with you soon.

52:41In the early days of John and Nate's businesses, they were wearing all the hats, content creation, SEO, sales, customer support. And that's how we start. That's totally normal. But as you grow, you might find some hats fit better than others, just as these guys have. For example, Nate mentioned the importance of prioritization and really focusing on your core competencies. Like where is your time best spent? All right, my top three takeaways from this call with John Jonas and Nate Hirsch. Number one is to buy time. John called hiring the only way he knows to buy time. And that got me thinking about the various resources at our disposal, time, money, talent, energy, and time is unique in that it's a non-renewable resource.

53:27Once you spend it, it's gone. Unlike money where you can always make more. So the idea of buying time stood out to me as something incredibly valuable to buy. I mean, what better to spend your money on? As you go through the exercises of auditing your hours, what time could you buy back? And in most cases, I probably wouldn't make a hire until you have revenue coming in to justify it. But as soon as you do, that opens up this opportunity for delegation, this opportunity to buy back your most precious non-renewable resource. That's takeaway number one, to buy time. Takeaway number two is it takes a leap.

54:04John described this mental shift, this liberating experience in forcing himself to start creating systems, to start trusting other people, to start delegating. And I liked Nate's point about thinking of your first hire as an experiment because you might not be the world's best boss on your first try. I know I certainly wasn't. I remember getting frustrated with Wasio, my first hire, when it was taking him longer than I thought it should to complete these tasks. The truth was, I'd been doing them myself almost daily for years at that point. My fingers could fly across the keyboard without even thinking.

54:38I knew every inch of the website interfaces we were dealing with when it was all new to him. On top of that, the processes that I'd internalized through practice, through repetition, you know, it took some time to get down on paper and to become similarly second nature for him. But it was an important leap, that little experiment that I've built up in my head to be a much bigger deal than it probably was in terms of downside risk, but it was a really empowering one at the same time. So that's takeaway number two. It takes this leap. Think of it as an experiment. And takeaway number three is it is better to over communicate since so much of our communication is non-verbal and you lose a ton of that in these virtual work arrangements.

55:21I think it's really important as both John and Nate described to be really upfront in your communication and setting expectation for communication. Some of my most aggravating virtual hiring experiences have come as a direct result of slow or unclear communication, especially if someone is working a different time zone from you, it can slow your progress to a crawl if you could only send and receive a message or two per day. I remember working with this development team in India, which had almost no overlap with my working hours. And it was something that wasn't an issue during onboarding because the sales team, of course, was working US business hours.

56:03But after they'd closed the deal, the rest of the team, the technical guys, were not. The part of this call about not doing a phone or Skype interview with a potential hire was really surprising to me, as that's always been a part of my process. But John and Nate made a good case for skipping it. Is it really necessary? For some roles, sure. But for others, probably not. Why make somebody jump through that hoop? All this stuff is something you'll learn as you go. But it was definitely interesting for me to hear how these guys with big virtual teams go about it. Now, as promised, I wanted to give you my two cents on online jobs and free up as a client of each.

56:42The advantages of online jobs as I see them are access to a wide talent pool, seriously wide. John's got over a quarter million resumes in his database, and there are some cool filters you can use to narrow down that candidate base. And like he mentioned, it's a really affordable option for full-time help. And that's primarily what you'll find is people looking for full-time work or at least 20 hour a week work. Once you make a hire, you'll pay your assistant directly and online jobs doesn't take any markup on the salary. Instead, the platform charges a monthly membership fee to post jobs and communicate with potential hires.

57:20And that fee starts at$69 a month at press time. And of course, you can put that on pause after you filled the role that you're looking for. It's a great place to find ongoing support virtual employee type of roles. FreeUp takes a different approach in that it's a curated freelance marketplace, meaning Nate's team only approves the quote top 1 % of freelancers to join. Nate said the current makeup of his talent pool is about 40 % from the Philippines, 40 % from the US, and 20 % from the rest of the world. The platform started out from Nate's background in e-commerce as serving other Amazon and e-commerce sellers, but they've gone much broader than that today.

58:01I've primarily used it for shorter term project-based work, but you can find ongoing assistance there as well. What I like about FreeUp is the speed of execution. You can post your job and the site is going to introduce you to candidates they feel are a good fit within 24 hours, usually within just a few hours. Then you can say, yes, let's get started and it's off to the races. Billing is done through the FreeUp platform and the site takes a small percentage of every hour or of every project build. Once again, you'll find the full text summary of this episode with all the links mentioned and John and Nate's top tips from the call at sidehustlenation.com slash virtual.

58:43That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.