PP 126: Hiring Our Replacement with John Jonas

Website: https://www.johnjonas.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnjonasofficial/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnjonas
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/thejohnjonas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjonas1/

Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host Kim Sutton and today I am absolutely thrilled to have John Jonas, the CEO of OnlineJobs.ph with us.

John, thank you so much for joining us today.

John Jonas: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Kim Sutton: Listeners, if you’ve been listening for a while — and I really hope you have — you’ve heard me — and that was not proper grammar — you’ve heard other guests and I talk numerous times about how we need to be outsourcing and delegating work to other people on our teams. And that is what John is helping people do around the world.

John, I would love if you would share with the listeners a little bit about your backstory and what you are doing today.

John Jonas: So, I am an entrepreneur at heart. I am a terrible employee. I graduated from college in 2003. I had a job for 10 months. And my only goal during those 10 months was to quit the job.

John Jonas: And I just I just don’t function well without an incentive to do good work where like, I’ll make more money if I do good work, and if I do bad work, I’ll make less money.

John Jonas: So, it took me 10 months to quit that job and start working online where I quickly found that online business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At least it isn’t everything that people make it out to be.

John Jonas: You hear all these stories of like Lamborghinis and vague exotic vacations, and it’s a bunch of crap. It’s not… It’s not a bunch of crap. It’s real. But you have to do things to get there and nobody talks about the things you have to do to get there. And, and most of those stories are made up anyway. People aren’t telling the truth in most of it.

John Jonas: So for me, I was overwhelmed and overloaded and working like 60 or 70 hours a week on my own business, and I just needed more. And I tried outsourcing.

John Jonas: I’m going to talk about outsourcing because that’s what I’m really good at. And that’s what people want to hear from me because it’s what I discovered really good.

John Jonas: So I tried outsourcing a couple different ways. I tried hiring people in India and it didn’t work, and I tried hiring local employees and that didn’t work for a number of reasons. They’re expensive, and when you teach them too much, the first thing they do is quit so they can go do it on their own.

John Jonas: And, and for me, I wanted something where I could automate parts of my…  entire parts of my business. And I wanted to be able to give someone a process and have that be off of my plate so I didn’t have to think about it.

John Jonas: And so I tried Upwork, which wasn’t Upwork at the time. It was it was Elance or oDesk before they merged, and… and the problem I found there was that hiring a contract worker, the contract worker doesn’t care about your business. They’re not involved in your business so like, they’re there to do a little bit of work and then to get paid, and that’s really their goal is to get paid and move on to the next job because that’s how Upwork works is you have to complete a job and get paid and get feedback in order to get more jobs.

John Jonas: So, and this is the major issue with Upwork that people don’t realize is it’s designed to around 100% turnover. People have to… People have to turn over, and running a business like that sucks. And that was where I was until I had a…

John Jonas: Is it okay for me to go on? Are you

Kim Sutton: I’m just sitting here thinking about how I have had contractors on Upwork ask me to end our contract and we hire them just so I can give them reviews so they can get more work.

John Jonas: Yeah, it’s terrible and you’re lucky that they’ve asked you to rehire them because you know, it’s just it’s a hard situation it didn’t work for me because it’s not how I work. I want automated passive recurring income and Upwork doesn’t work for that. It requires too much constant management recruiting that I didn’t like and you can’t teach someone something because next week, they’re gone working for someone else and it’s just too painful.

John Jonas: So, one day I was talking with the owner of (?) and you know, like they’re saying “This dude knows what he’s doing.” And this was 10 years ago. He said, “You know, John, when you’re ready to start outsourcing some of the stuff you’re doing, make sure you go to the Philippines with it.”

John Jonas: And I was like, “Huh, that’s different, right?” Because I just thought outsourcing was outsourcing. It’s a pain. It’s a headache. It’s a babysitting job. It’s problematic, right? It just sucks. But it’s a necessary evil.

John Jonas: And I said, “Yeah, why the Philippines?” And he said, “Well, because in India when you tell them something, and they say, yes, that means yes, I heard something come out of your mouth. It doesn’t mean yes, I understood what you said.”

John Jonas: To me, it was like shocking, you know, I mean, to hear that, first of all, and then second, it kind of gave me a little bit hope that there might be something different than what I had experienced. And he gave me a reference right to hire someone and in the Philippines, hire someone full time. And that was a key that I didn’t recognize at the time because I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to hire someone full time. I didn’t think I could keep someone busy full time. I didn’t think I had enough work. I didn’t think I could afford it. But that was what he gave me. And this was before there was ways to find people was really hard to find people in the Philippines then.

John Jonas: And so it took me a couple months. I debated, went back and forth hesitated, whatever. And I finally hired someone, and I hired them full time because that was my option. And it was the most… the single most liberating experience of my life. Because all of a sudden, I went from doing everything on my own to having someone else whose full time job was to do anything I asked him to do.

John Jonas: And he didn’t know how to do anything. I had to teach him how to do everything. But that meant I was able to teach him how to do anything I wanted, and teach him how to do it my way, the way that I knew how to do it the way that I knew worked. So everything that I was currently doing in my business, I started one by one teaching him how to do it.

John Jonas: So like my terrible experience with with Upwork with oDesk at the time was I wanted someone to write articles for me and get them (?) was getting published on other websites and, and it just wasn’t functional because they wrote the articles and they sent them back to me and said, Hey, I’m done, pay me. And so then I had to go through and make sure they weren’t plagiarized. And I had to one by one, go and modify them with links and headers and titles and, and go and publish them one by one in other websites. And it was it and I hated it.

John Jonas: And this dude, I taught him how to write the articles. And then I taught him how to modify the articles and I taught… and I taught him how to publish the articles. And he did the entire process for me. And that was where productivity changed for me.

John Jonas: Where I one day I realized a couple months in I realized, there’s two of me. Like there’s me, and then there’s him doing my work that I was previously doing. And now I’m able to focus on other things, like how to make sales. Like how to improve our marketing.

John Jonas: Instead of focusing on the minute little details of the business. I was working on the businesses that have been the business way type of business to do. Yep. Then john.

So at the time I was running affiliate businesses where we were we were just building websites and publishing content and driving traffic to them with affiliate links.

Kim Sutton: So and how hard was it to find other things to fill your time?

John Jonas: Not hard at all because… Because I…

John Jonas: Okay, so here’s, here’s the problem most most people have today online in it. So my only experience is running an online business. That’s all I’ve done for 12 years. And so… So when people talk about like, oh, in my job or stuff like that, I don’t have any experience with it. I don’t have anything to offer. But in running an online business, I know a lot. And so, what I often find with people is they’re so overloaded with information that they don’t even process the information that they’re given because they know there’s not time to implement it. And this was me.

(Transcription still being cleaned up. Thank you for checking it out, though!)

John Jonas: so like, I would find this really awesome tactic that we could do for Facebook marketing. And, and I just knew as I learned about it that I didn’t have time to implement it. Otherwise, if I implemented I was gonna have to stop doing something else that was also working or maybe not where I don’t know, whatever it was, I couldn’t do something else. And so I wouldn’t even learn whatever it was because it was too painful to my brain to say, Oh, yeah, holy cow. Here’s another thing I’m supposed to be doing and I don’t have time to do it. And with what once I had these guys in the Philippines working for me, I realized, Oh, I not only can I learn this thing, but I can learn it really well, because I’m not going to implement it. And I can learn it and think through how I’m going to have them implemented while I’m learning it. Because I know this is my job now is not to implement My job is to learn and run and direct my business to be the CEO, instead of being the grunt worker.

Kim Sutton: So what did the growth look like in your team? How long did the first worker, your first team member, stay with you, and when did you add your next?

John Jonas: He is still with me today. And that is one of…

Kim Sutton: That’s awesome.

John Jonas: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. That’s one of the great things about the Philippines is they’re super super loyal. If you treat them well, it’s not like other places where as soon as they receive a job offer for more pay, they’re jumping ship. Like I had a girl who I said, hey, you’re going to be directly interacting with our customers and our customers. No, because I talked about you, right? And I said to her, you, you just you’re going to receive job offers, I want you to be careful and No, I don’t want you to leave. Right? She said, Oh, don’t worry, sir. I already get job offers every day from people. And I’m not leaving you. Because that’s how Filipinos are. So how long did it take me to grow to the second one? Honestly, I don’t remember this was 10 or 11 years ago. But I remember thinking there’s not enough work for him to do every day and then After a couple months, I remember thinking, I think I could handle another one. And that’s when I hired a second person.

Kim Sutton: So, well, I, I never discussed this on the podcast before. But I am designing a planner, the Positive Productivity Planner and my graphic designer Kenneth. And this will be in the show notes as well, everything that we’re talking about, and I’ll give the link to that in just a second. But Kenneth is in the Philippines, Philippines. I gave him a few sketches on what I was thinking. He took off, came back with basically the whole planner designed exactly how I wanted it. And he’s actually pushing me to get it done.

Because he’s excited about it.

What’s next, Kim? You know, what are we working on next? and john, I have a little bit of an opposite problem. I have chronic idea disorder. So I will try to implement too many things at one time. Instead of just getting Finished. So I think I need to be more active on online jobs.ph to find out who I can be giving things to. Yeah.

Yeah. So and you know, today Frankly, I, I often have that I just have to say no to so many ideas, because I’ve learned working on more than one thing at one time is hard. It’s hard to give your energy, your mental capacity energy to multiple things at the same time. So I have lots of stuff going on. All related to the same thing. And but I’m not doing the implementing on any of them. So,

right. So we have something in common we both have five kids. So I’m very curious how this, how growing your team and growing your business and I want you to share more about how you grew on my job.ph and just a moment, but what is this? How is it affected your ability to spend time with your family.

John Jonas: Okay, so you mentioned before we started this podcast, you mentioned Tim Ferriss. When I read the four hour workweek years ago, I read it and just kept thinking, this is me. This is my life. This is my lifestyle. He’s describing me. We’ve taken the mini retirements, the month long, mini retirements. I work 17 hours a week about I call it 17 Hour Workweek because I’ve been at the four hour workweek. And it wasn’t enough for me, I need to I need somebody to keep myself busy. But my typical work day is I get up and say prayers, read scriptures, make my kids lunches, get my kids to school,

play or read with my youngest kids.

work for an hour to exercise with my wife for couple hours, come home and work for an hour. And then my kids come home from school. And I’m usually done when they get home. And and then we, you know, I’ll take my son to hockey, his hockey practice or go on a bike ride with my girls or something like that. It the amount of time spent with my kids and my wife is amazing. And it’s it’s it’s interesting. My my oldest son one time was at his grandparents house. He spent the night there. And all he’s ever known is dads at home. That’s all he knows. So his grandpa was getting dressed in the morning like putting on a shirt and tie. And my son said, Papa, where are you going? He said, I’m going to work. And my son said, Why don’t you just going there and work? Because that’s all my son knows. And funny. Yeah, he said, Well, some people actually go to work. Most people go to work because what he’s what he said to my son, but my kids have no idea because dads home all day long and dads, they’re available for them all day every day. So, wow.

Okay, we definitely need to talk more, because I need to get down from my current hours. listeners, it’s not always the best number that I that I talked about. 217 And yes, that was 17 that john said not seven zero.

Which wouldn’t surprise I’m sure a lot of us if you had said 70 Right.

Right. I mean, I I had been there years ago. And okay, so let me if people are looking to cut their workweeks down, let me tell you my secret to it. I have two secrets. One of them is every decision I make in business is based around who’s going to do the work. Because it mirrors that someone else. And so I just won’t do things in our business regardless of how much money they’ll make us if it requires me to do the work. And so that’s, that’s number one. The second thing that I found and this was a total accident, but Tim Ferriss talks about mini retirements, right? So we did it. The first time we did it was in 2008. We went to Costa Rica for a month took my three kids and my wife and spent a month on the beach in Costa Rica. And I actually expected to work quite a bit while we were there until I found out the internet is horrible. And what I found while I was there was stuff that didn’t get done wasn’t that important? and stuff that was important. Just got taken over by other people on my team. The guys in the Philippines just stepped up and started doing stuff and obviously I gave him direction I had given them training ahead of time and whatnot. But when I got home, I found I don’t really have anything to do, because everything I was doing previously either isn’t important, or is getting done by other people. So we’ve done that three different times we’ve gone on these mini retirements and every single time I found the same thing, it cuts out garbage in it offload stuff to other people. And it makes me more productive.

Wow.

So there’s that’s an odd one that I didn’t expect. But I’m so much more productive because I take long vacations.

So if you had to, or if you wanted to know I’m going to put it that way. If you wanted to

drop everything and leave tomorrow. Would there be anything holding you back? No.

Yes, I mean, besides school, what what do you mean drop everything and leave tomorrow. You mean like move somewhere else? And

suppose you wanted to go on a month long vacation starting tomorrow.

Now that’d be fine. There. I mean, every, every day, let me tell you my work day, I’ll tell you what I do. I have a project management system, and I have email. Those are the only two things that I do. My workers report in the project management system of what’s going on, or what they did, or they report through email one of the two. And, and I give them feedback. And I give them direction. And I give them new ideas of things that I want them to implement. And I think through those ideas and say, you know, like, I want to implement it, I’ll give you an example. We want to create invoicing and online jobs. So I think through it, like, Hey, this is where invoicing fits. This is why it fits. This is what we’re going to do with it. Here’s how it looks like on the website, or at least the general idea. Here’s the process that I wanted to go through here the steps. So I write that all out. And then I give it Someone else and they go and do the design. And he came up with a design yesterday I said, Okay, I think you’re missing this thing. So he goes back and creates it. And then like, Great now give it to the programmer and have him implanted. And that’s what I do every day. That’s why it only takes me a couple hours, because all I’m doing is giving feedback and direction. So if I were to leave and like, not have internet access for a month, my business would still run, my team would be less productive. Right, but when I came back, they’ll still be there. But yeah, nothing would really nothing would break.

That’s amazing. So is every one of your team members in the Philippines then?

Yes.

I have a business partner in Idaho.

He owns a business with me and he works on the business too. And if I were to leave and not have access to the internet, he would know he probably wouldn’t take over any of my responsibilities. But you know, People he would see people’s reporting. And we’d kind of share that together where we’ll give feedback together. And he would do some of that. But generally, yeah, I mean, everybody’s in the Philippines. Yes.

So you had the affiliate business, how did you build and grow online jobs?

So I was hiring people in the Philippines, to run the affiliate businesses. And at the same time, I had so many people asking me, how are you doing this? How are you hiring these people? How are you finding them? How are you managing what’s, what’s the secret here? Because it was so different than what people had experienced. And it was so different than what I had experienced at that point, right. where, you know, I’ve already gone through the difficulties with outsourcing of what people normally experience. And I just found myself teaching it like three times a week. And and the problem was at the time it was really hard to find people and so one day I decided there’s got to be a better way to find people in the Philippines. So we started online jobs.ph. And it was kind of like I was I was recruiting someone and was irritated with how difficult it was. I figured there’s got to be a better way. And then and then our customers, people that we were teaching, I wanted a better way to refer them to something. Right? So we built a simple system. I asked the six people in the Philippines who worked for me, how do you think we can market this in the Philippines? And they said, Oh, I think I can post it on Friendster. I think I can post it on Craigslist. I think I can tell my friends about it. That’s all we did in the Philippines to grow it. And actually, I just noticed yesterday that we have over 300,000 Filipino resumes now.

Wow. That’s impressive.

So that’s how we grew it in the Philippines was we did nothing basically, they just they want jobs and there aren’t jobs. And so when we provided them jobs, they they’ve just flocked to it. around the world for employers. I, we definitely did stuff I I’ve done a lot of webinars or speaking or podcasts or whatever written articles, marketing. But I think a lot of what we’ve done is just kind of word of mouth. Because when people find like, like you were you hired this graphic designer in the Philippines and said, Oh my gosh, this is really, really good, and really affordable. And then you go and tell people, and, and that’s kind of, that’s how we built it. Actually, for like, six or seven years, I ignored online jobs, because it wasn’t intended to be like this big, huge business. It was intended to be a way for me to find people. And I accomplished that when I had like 1000 resumes.

That’s been something that’s been amazing to me, and I’m going to loop it back to what you were saying earlier is the loyalty. Because Kenneth has been so amazing that I’ve been referring him to all my clients.

No

Don’t need time, though, at this point.

Oh, you don’t have him full time.

I don’t have him full time.

Okay, all right.

I am hoping Kenneth’s Get ready. It’s gonna happen. But you know, until that point, but I know that he’s charging people who I’m referring him to more.

Yeah, but he’s always more like, What? What was that? More like, what?

More than he charging me?

How much is he charging you?

Um, I believe he just raised it to 848 40 an

hour. super expensive.

Well, it is but compared to what?

No, compared to compared to what a graphic designer in the states costs.

Oh, yeah. It’s nothing but no, that’s up to 100 Yeah, right. But

I do have to say I was not using your platform. Oh, yeah. compared

to the other portfolios I was seeing his blew me away.

Yeah. So I have a really, really good graphic designer, who I pay him $600 a month for full time work. Wow, he’s really good. I’m sorry, I interrupted you. You were saying he’s charging. Okay. Just

the loyalty. You know, he’s always there even though he is being referred to other people. Yes. He’s getting so busy now.

Yes, yeah, that’s the problem. don’t refer people out. At least I don’t I none of my people ever get referred to someone else that that doesn’t happen because as soon as someone else realizes, oh, this guy’s really good. They hire him full time. And in the Philippines, people’s loyalty is to their full time job. So like a part time job is good. But if they have a full time job, that’s their loyalty. And that’s that that’s their lifeblood, right? That’s. So that’s my advice. Don’t don’t pass your people around.

I am going to make note of that. So, could you share with listeners how your system actually works and how they would go about finding a full time? team member on online? jobs.ph?

Yeah. So, so let me let me I’ll just explain a little bit online jobs, like I said, was designed to be able to find people in the Philippines better, right. So today it is the largest. It’s the largest database of of Filipino resumes looking to work online. And that’s a big deal, in that the workers are looking to work online for a foreign employer, as opposed to another website where they’re looking to work in an office. So here’s something interesting about online work in the Philippines. It’s kind of odd to people. Were almost like it’s looked down upon if you don’t have an office job, like working in an office is looked on as prestigious. But having a foreign boss is also prestigious. So Filipinos who are looking to work online, it just it makes a difference in in in your experience okay so if you want to find someone you go on to online jobs.ph and you search for let’s talk about webmaster WordPress guy you search WordPress or if you scroll down you’ll find WordPress link and it’ll take you to results of worker resumes who have said they know WordPress. And those links are searches that I have put together. Like if I’m looking for a WordPress person, here’s what I’m going to search for not just WordPress, because if you search WordPress, you’re going to get like 12,000 resumes and you can’t recruit out of 12,000. So you need to narrow it down. And so when you get the the narrow it down, you’re going to use the advanced search or you’re going to filter kind of more of what you are looking For when you’ve done that, so and there’s two ways to do this, I’m just talking about searching for resumes, you’re gonna start contacting people. In order to contact them, you have to pay you have to upgrade. And online jobs we don’t like. So like Upwork charges at 20% fee on top of their salary bit, and I don’t know if they charge the employer or the worker or combination of the two, but there’s a 20% cut that Upwork takes,

well, it can be both. So the employer pays, but if the contractor wants to buy additional credits, then they have to pay two.

Yeah, so we don’t do any of that. There’s no fees. So it’s a lot better for the workers is better for you, where once you’ve hired this person, you’re never going to pay us a fee for it. All you’d pay is an upfront recruiting fee. And it’s either $49 or it’s $200 depending on what you want. And so then you’re going to want to once you’ve once you’ve upgraded your account You’re gonna start contacting people, you’re going to contact a lot of people, you’re going to contact like 30 people, email them, tell them what you’re looking for, tell them, Hey, I have a job. I’m looking for this and this, and this are you still looking for. And because a lot of the people in online jobs and this goes back to the loyalty thing, it if they already have a job and their employer didn’t mark their profile as hired, then if they have a job, they won’t respond to you. They won’t even respond to your job offer a lot of people because they’re loyal to their current employer, not everybody, some people will respond. Like I was recruiting someone recently. And I had two different people respond to say, Yes, I’m available part time I have a full time job. So that and that and that’s becoming more and more common, but so you’re gonna contact a lot of people those who respond and and this is the same thing with if you were to go on to online jobs. And instead of searching for a webmaster, you posted a job saying, Hey, I’m looking for a webmaster and then you start getting applicants they start applying to your job. Right. So So there’s two options here, you can either contact people proactively or you can post a job and let people apply to you. From there. It’s the same process, you’re going to email these people over and over and over and over again, asking them very few questions in each email 1234 questions in each one? And the idea is, the more questions you ask the more times you email someone, the better you get to know them. And and the better you get to see their English and the better you get to see their responsiveness. And the better you get to see their attention to detail and the more likely it is that you’re going to hire someone that fits with you that you’re going to have a better success rate. If you send more emails and ask more questions in the recruiting process. So from there, so you’ve posted your job, you’ve gotten responses you’ve or you’ve contacted people, you’ve gotten responses. You’ve emailed a bunch of People a bunch of times and you’ll find the more you email people, the more people drop off, they just don’t respond anymore. And you’ll end up with one or two good people who you’re going to make a choice between and you’re gonna have a gut feeling. Go with your gut feeling on them. And then you’re gonna offer them a job say, hey, great, I want to hire you. You know if it’s part time, I want to start part time when can you start? Here’s what I’m going to pay you here’s what I want from you.

Or full time I expect 40 hours a week.

When I hire someone, I tell them I don’t, I don’t have any specific days off. You can have as much time off as you want. I just want you to tell me ahead of time when when you’re going to take time off. And I’ve never find found someone to abuse that. I do tell them what it paying I want. I will pay you so I pay people once a month but that’s because I’m establishing people trust me. When you get started. You’ll probably need to pay your Once a week, because, you know, we, there’s two kinds of trusts in the Philippines, we often think, oh, I don’t know if I can trust this person, right? That’s our perspective. We don’t ever think that they might think the same thing. I don’t know if I could trust this employer. I don’t know if I can trust them to pay me. I don’t know if I can trust them to not yell at me when I do something wrong. And those those are big things in the Philippines. So I I tell them I’ll pay you once a week for the first two months. And then after that, I’m gonna pay you monthly. I also tell them I want an invoice. So for tax reasons for you know, so I can deduct it. I just want an invoice from you every time I was supposed to pay you. Otherwise, I’ll forget to pay you because I don’t. I don’t want one more thing to think about. I don’t want to remember something else to pay someone you know.

Absolutely. JOHN, I do have a couple questions for you. What project management system do you use?

We use Basecamp. And I love it.

Is there a invoicing software that you notice a lot of your team members using

I don’t know, because I don’t get the invoices anymore.

That’s a good answer. That was very good.

Um, I remember when I was getting the invoices there was invoicing is so easy. There’s so much free invoicing and online jobs, we’ll have invoicing like, next week for them. So that’s easy.

So here’s one of the experiences that I had. And

I don’t think I’ve ever shared this either before I did have the experience of Indian team members as well. And I would often find that things took 10 times longer than they should have even simple tasks. And when I did start working with people in the Philippines that was no longer an issue, get it done, and then asked me what they can do next.

So Here’s the big, big difference. And this is something most people don’t realize. India still has the caste system. And it affects. So they their way of life is just very, very different than ours their way of thinking. So, in India, if someone is above you, you’re not allowed to tell them. No. And this is where Yes. comes from. Yes, man. How’s the project going? Yes. Are you working on it? Yes. It’s gonna be done on time. Yes. What? You know, based on your work, I know it that’s none of that’s correct. Right. The Philippines doesn’t have that issue. They don’t say yes, if something is wrong, they say nothing. Because that’s culturally, that’s how the Philippines is. If If your worker says nothing if they don’t show up to work. It’s not that they don’t want the job. It’s not that they didn’t want to show up to work. It’s that they don’t understand something and they don’t know what to do and you need to seek it out. and say hi I think you’re stuck on something, hey, I think you have a problem with something. When someone doesn’t show up 98% of the time, that’s the problem. It’s it’s usually your fault with the Philippines. In India, that’s not the case. It’s just it’s different. But Filipinos also because the cultural difference, they’re proactive, like they’ll be proactive with solving problems with fixing things, as long as they trust you. If they don’t, if they don’t trust you yet to not yell at them or to not be mad at them when they do something wrong or to not fire them when they do something wrong. If they don’t trust you, yet, they won’t go above and beyond. They won’t try and solve problems yet, but once they do, trust you, yeah, like what you said, they’ll say, Hey, I finished this. And I also did this because I thought this would be good and what can I do next?

So yeah, you’re right.

I do realize this is the positive productivity podcast. However, if you’ve seen one issue That causes relationships not to work between business owners and in a team member, would it be just as you were just talking about because

yes, it’s it’s this issue, it’s Filipinos they describe themselves as shy is what they say. And by shy, they mean they want to avoid confrontation. But really, it’s it’s kind of better described as they don’t want to lose face.

So like if they do something wrong, it

they will avoid doing something wrong or they’ll avoid doing something good, out of fear of doing something wrong. If they fear that you’re going to yell at them, or get mad at them or say, Oh, you did this wrong or something like that, right? So once they trust you that you won’t do that to them, that man they will go above and beyond. But if they They fear that and they do something wrong or they don’t know how to do something. Or like they don’t understand instructions, if they don’t understand what they’re supposed to do that rather than saying, Hey, I don’t understand this, they’ll just keep trying nothing. Instead of letting you down, they’re very pleasing people, they don’t want to let you down. And so they would disappear. And from a United States perspective, or Australia or UK perspective, that’s very backwards. We’re like, if you don’t understand something, you say something. And in the Philippines, they won’t.

Until they trust you, when they trust you, they will.

And so you have to do things to prevent that from happening. So even if you if your work doesn’t show up, even if you think your instructions are the most clear instructions ever redo them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an employer say, oh, man, I I hired this guy and I gave him the The most basic, easy instructions to follow and, and he didn’t do it, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t. He didn’t show up. I was like, Well send it to me. And I look at the instructions. And I was like, dude, I have no clue what you’re asking for here. You know, where the employers think, Oh, yeah, these are so obvious. But when they send it to me, it was like that, you know, I don’t know. So that, that that’s the biggest problem that people run into. Is, is the worker not understanding something? And the employer thinking it’s very clear and that the worker is stupid, or that they didn’t really want the job?

Yeah, and I think I help that a lot from the stars just by saying that communication is really important. One way or the other. Just be in touch.

Yeah, that’s a big deal.

Yeah. Yeah. If there’s a question ask it. And exactly like you were saying, you know, just let me know when you’re not going to be available because a lot of stress and anxiety And I’m not I’m not the yelling type. When it’s not my kids. I’m not dealing type anyway. Right? So, yeah,

yeah. And making yourself available to them is a big deal like saying, hey, I want to do the report, and I’m going to be here and then answering every single email they send you, you know, not ignoring them or not, you know, kind of building a relationship with them, where they begin to trust you that you’re there to help them you’re here to help them succeed in their job. Just go so far towards creating a rockstar employee.

You know, what I love is the fact that I can go to sleep and know that stuff is getting done while I’m sleeping. Just because the time zone difference isn’t the best.

Oh, it’s so I’m productive. 24 hours a day, even though I work 17 per week, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, that is so incredible. JOHN, I want to thank you so much for being here today. Where can listeners find you online and Oh and listeners, I totally forgot to mention where you can find all the show notes and all the links and everything that we’ve talked about that’s at KIM SUTTON comm forward slash p p 126. But john, where can people find you online and online? jobs.ph? I mean, that one sort of obvious, but where else can they connect with you?

Oh, I’m

so or

team members. Yeah, all your emails. I don’t like social

media. I think Facebook is the worst thing ever. It’s the biggest time waster and so I avoid it like the plague. So I’m not available on Facebook. I feel the same way about Twitter. When I’m sitting at my computer, I’m productive. That’s productive time to me and my phone is when I when I’m somewhere I want to be somewhere and not in another world on my phone. So Facebook, Twitter, and That not very good. If you want to get if you want to get a hold of me, I’m available infinitely available through email. So you can contact me at my blog, Jonah’s blog calm, or at john Jones comm or if you use any of the Contact Us links on any of my websites, and asked me ask for me, it’ll get to me you won’t go to me initially. But if you say, Hey, this is for john, somebody will forward it to me. They know it happens all the time.

Fabulous. What is one piece of closing advice that you would have for listeners?

So, if

you have to try this in order in order to see if, if this works, you have to try it because it doesn’t work for everybody. And to see like, Can I get six hours of my week back by hiring someone for 40 hours? Or can I get 10 hours of my week back by hiring someone? 40 hours a week? Does that work for me? You have to give it a shot. And that’s a leap of faith to do it.

But you have to do it to find out.