How John Jonas Outsources To Full Time Staff For As Little As $200 Month
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John Jonas and I spent several months trying to connect to get this interview done, but it was worth the wait.
I was referred to him via Adam Short from Niche Profit Classroom as a guy who has a unique insight into a particular type of outsourcing online – in this case, hiring people specifically from the Philippines.
Why the Philippines? Well there are many reasons, most of which John outlines in this interview, and by the end of it I’m sure you will be rushing to look into this method yourself.
This is a really, really good podcast interview. It’s one of those discussions where the person being interviewed is willing to share the exact steps used to get something done. If you have ever considered doing any outsourcing online to help grow your business, listen to this call.
Outsourcing Is Not Always Easy
I’ve been telling people to “outsource” for many years, and unfortunately a lot of people come back to me with stories about how difficult it is to find quality contractors.
Common wisdom with outsourcing is that you go to a site like elance.com, guru.com or rentacoder.com, submit a job and then attempt to find the best person to get the project done. This can work, but it’s hit and miss and in most cases you have to go through some “bad” experiences before you get to the good people.
John Jonas has a different system, one that focuses on hiring people full time at very affordable rates, and then establishing a long term relationship that’s more like an outsourced employee than a odd job contractor, who only works with you when you have a project on.
When I say a relationship with his outsourcers, John well and truly trusts his people. He’s willing to give them access to his hosting accounts and even his Paypal account. There’s a lot of trust required to be that comfortable letting other people, especially people in another country far away, have control over pretty much everything in your business.
If you’re curious how John can do this, listen to the interview and you will find out how.
Show Notes
- How John started off and was able to quit his job thanks to online marketing
- How he first found out about outsourcing to the Philippines
- Why John stopped using elance type sites and instead started hiring full time
- John explains an entire case study of how he had his outsourcers set up an entire income stream that they manage without him
- Why John is able to trust his outsourcers with every aspect of his business
- What website options are available for outsourcing to the Philippines
- John takes us through an example of how to locate a Philippino worker using the website he uses to find good people
- We discuss the ethical concerns of hiring a full time worker for as little as $200 a month
- What John teaches in his ReplaceMyself.com website
Want To Outsource To The Philippines?
If you’re interested in doing what John does, and getting access to more training materials and his system you can use to train your outsourcers once you hire them, check out John’s site, ReplaceMyself.com.
John spends much of his time helping to outsource the way he does because he enjoys it, and since so much of his business is outsourced already, he has the time to do so. If you want his help, check out -
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How To Work Less and Earn More By Leveraging The Synergy Between People And Technology
Several years ago when I was managing BetterEdit, my proofreading company that I sold in 2007, I was knee deep learning from Rich Schefren, taking his Business Growth System course.
Rich launched that program on the back of his most successful report to date, the Internet Business Manifesto, which featured the now famous flow chart of what an Internet entrepreneur is supposed to do if he or she wants to succeed online. If you haven’t read the Manifesto, I strongly recommend you do so as soon as possible, it’s still one of the most crucial reports on Internet marketing as an entrepreneur ever written.
After reading the Manifesto it was clear I needed to make some changes, so I joined Rich’s coaching program and began going through it. The premise of what Rich teaches is the idea that no person can realistically ever get to the point where their business looks after them, rather than they look after their business, if you do everything by yourself. Rich took this idea a lot further than just outsourcing, and sees business as a machine that can be completely automated.
At that point in time BetterEdit was doing well and I did have Angela, my admin/customer service person looking after most of the day to day emailing for the business, which is the main workload to keep it going. This was great, but as a result of thinking so much about automation and studying Rich’s course, I was interested in possibly using technology to further systematize the operations and gain more leverage.
Using Software To Automate
BetterEdit has a very simple job flow process. A client submits a paper and makes payment, the admin person assigns the job and forwards the document to an editor. The editor completes the job and returns to the document to both the admin and the client. Various emails flow back and forth if there are problems, but generally that’s the basic process.
One of the key weaknesses of the system I had was no affiliate program. I saw huge potential if I could find a way to pay a commission out to websites that referred jobs to the business. Besides manually tracking things, which would be a nightmare, I just couldn’t do it.
The answer to the affiliate issue was to create some kind of software that would handle the job process, including payments, so we could automatically track affiliate referrals and credit commissions for jobs completed.
I had to be careful because between paying editors and admin, the margin on jobs wasn’t massive. This wasn’t like an information product where I could pay out 50% commissions, I’d have to be careful. This was another reason where I saw software as a help as it could reduce the amount of work admin did, meaning I could incentivize affiliates with a higher commission.
With a software system in place, including an affiliate program, I could get out there and recruit an army of websites to refer customers to my business. I liked this idea because by then I was getting pretty tired of heading out to campuses to put up posters to promote the service, although I was starting to outsource this job too (my mind was constantly thinking about how I could work less without reducing my income).
Realizing Your Concept Can Be Tough
It was clear that software could be the automation answer, so I scheduled a meeting with a local development firm and sat down with them to talk about my plan.
Rich Schefren’s New Coaching Program Opens Today
As many of my long-term readers know, I went through a Rich Schefren coaching program back in 2006. The reason I originally joined was because of what Rich presented in the Internet Business Manifesto.
Unless you have been deleting all your subscriptions to Internet marketing email lists then you probably already know that today Rich is opening the doors to his latest personal coaching program –
I wrote a notice to my newsletter about this program and I’m going to reproduce it below for my blog readers who are not on my newsletter so you can benefit from my experience with Rich’s training.
Before I do that let me be clear about one thing –
Rich’s coaching is only for a certain type of person because it’s cost prohibitive for many, HOWEVER, his resources like the Manifesto and the report he released last week, The Entrepreneurial Emergency, and the audios and teleconferences he releases, are all free and present great ideas. Yes there is a sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden sales pitch, but the core message can be taken away without spending a dime.
If the coaching program offer today from Rich is annoying you because you are sick of hearing about it or you think it’s way too over priced, just focus on what you can learn and implement from the free stuff.
For those of you in a position to invest in business coaching I give a strong endorsement of Rich’s programs. Rich is the only person I ever gave $5,000 of my money to for coaching. It’s worth it just because Rich is so generous with his personal time – you will definitely get a chance to talk to him directly if you join his program.
With that out of the way, here’s what I have to say about the Guided Profit System –
Rich Schefren Didn’t See This One Coming…
Willie Crawford posted this photo up on his blog. It’s a snapshot he took at the Las Vegas networking event attended by a bunch of people, including myself and Rich Schefren, the target of my tom foolery in the photo…
Rich definitely didn’t see that coming and probably hasn’t seen the photo yet, but now he will 
.
Rich may not have noticed my joking around (he was in a serious discussion at the time so he had an excuse) but in general he’s definitely one of the best guys I know of at predicting the future and seeing the big picture when it comes to business.
Right now he’s completing the final touches on his next report, the latest incarnation of the ideas he began with the Internet Business Manifesto, which as I explained to my newsletter subscribers, is the best free report I have read – it had the most impact on my business of anything I have studied online.
If you haven’t got the Manifesto yet, now is the perfect time to download it and read it in preparation for what is to come.
Download The Internet Business Manifesto
Did You Miss The Call?
A couple of days ago I was included on a call with Rich Schefren and a bunch of his previous clients, all of whom are tremendously successful Internet business owners.
If you missed the call you can listen to the streaming version here -
The Internet Business Manifesto Teleseminar
The call was a special series of expert-only interviews, where Rich interrogated each of us by asking the following four questions -
Inside My Business: The Evolution Of A Customer Service System
This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.
In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here – Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.
In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here – Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.
In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).
Starting From The Beginning
To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).
My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.
To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).
My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.
Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.
My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.
I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.
My First Taste of Success
One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players – but it did.
Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.
If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook – a reason for people to come back to the site every day – well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).
My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.
If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see – How to make money from your website using advertising.
