Episode 026 - Why You Need a VA from the Philippines from OnlineJobs.ph

Michelle explains why she believes you’ll pay less for a better and more loyal VA by using OnlineJobs.ph as opposed to an agency.  This episode has tips and tricks to hiring your first Virtual Assistant and why Michelle believes a VA from the Philippines is the best for you.

Plus, contest details are inside this episode!  Enter to win BIG!!  Go and Grow!

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to.

BNB dash boss podcast. And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about VA's virtual assistants. I'm super excited about this subject because I just got done doing an amazing interview with John Jonas from online jobs.ph, which is like one of, if not the biggest virtual assistant resource on the web, they link you together with more Filipino virtual assistants than anyone else.

It's a great website. I'll explain more of it in just a moment. But first our show today is brought to you by audible. Audible is where you get your audio books online and get a 30 day trial into the audible membership for free. By going to audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue that's audible trial.com forward slash.

S T R revenue. You'll get your first audio book for free and 30 days into the audible membership, just for trying us out. You'll love audible. Right [email protected]. You can find our $7 courses available for you to try out, find out how to cohost, how to do rental arbitrage, or how to invest in real estate.

We're all three, by going to B and b-boss.com and clicking on our store. And you'll find our $7 courses right there. Try us out. You'll love it. You'll love those courses and they're only there for a limited time. So do it. Also, don't forget our contest. We've got our contest running right now in every week.

We're picking a winner. And everyone's names are going to be put into a drawing at the end for a final prize of an Amazon Dodd with a little clock on it. And your guests will love that. There'll be able to walk right in, ask Alexa to connect to their account, and they'll be able to play their favorite music, ask for the weather or whatever else they want to ask Alexa to do pretty darn awesome.

And I would really greatly appreciate. You going to iTunes and leaving me a five star review. I appreciate it. So please do take a picture of it. Send it over to me at Michelle at BNB dash boss. Let me know that you did and we'll enter you in those drawings. Okay. If you're new to the business and you're really not sure what a VA is, a VA is a virtual assistant.

This is just basically like a personal assistant or something that you would have, but instead of having them follow you around like a little gofer, they're virtual with you because they're somewhere else and they can be anywhere else in the world. Now, one of the best places to get a virtual assistant.

In my opinion, in my humble opinion. And in John Jonas's humble opinion as well, the Philippines is the best place to get virtual assistants. Filipinos are amazing people. They are kind and funny and smart. They speak. English as well as you and I, they watch American TV. So they know our lingo. And not only that, they really are good people.

They want to please you all the time. Everything is about making you happy. It's like a was in the United States years and years ago, you know, when people used to really enjoy what they do and try to please their bosses. And now it seems like everyone is out for themselves. Filipinos are not like that.

They really want to please you. I mean, they're super respectful. I cannot say enough about. Our Filipino VA is now I've had VAs from a couple of different countries other than the Philippines I've had VA's from Venezuela. And they're very good. They do have a lot of challenges down in Venezuela because they have the rolling blackouts since the communists have taken over well, it was socialist and then turned to communism.

So basically the same thing that's going on in America right now that we're trying to fight is what happened to Venezuela. I had traveled to Venezuela and you could see it, man. I'm telling you, it's just like looking in a mirror right now. When we went down there, you could just see that they were just taxing the middle-class to death until they were eliminated and you had nothing, but the very, very wealthy and the very, very poor.

And then few stolen elections and the rigged press and everything that just turned the whole country around. And they literally have people starving to death. Now it's really, really sad what's going on there. So we had picked up some virtual assistance from Venezuela, but the challenge was the rolling blackouts.

I mean, we never knew. When they were going to get back to us, it was hard to keep deadlines and everything needs to be handled, especially in our business, it needs to be handled in a timely manner. So it's very difficult to have a virtual assistant who can't commit to certain times and obviously is definitely not their fault, but at the same time from the business side as a business owner, You can't just say, well, you can answer them tomorrow or the next day or the next day.

That's not going to work for you. So we've also used virtual assistants from India. And the challenge that we have with virtual assistants from India is people lack of understanding. They don't know our lingo, like the Filipinos know our lingo. People can speak English and obviously they speak English and a lot of countries.

And, you know, have you ever gone to Scotland or Ireland where they have that really thick Gaelic? And you're like, what the heck language is this person speaking? And you're like, they're speaking English. And you're like, really? Cause I don't understand anything that they're saying right now. It's pretty much the same.

And they'll say words and you are like, what are they talking about? And they're like, oh, they said this and this and this. You don't know what the words are when you hear stuff, you're your mind always takes it for what it means in the United States. And that's because we're all speaking the same language.

Yes. But we all have a different lingo. There's slang that other people just don't understand. And if you mix that with the Indian accent, sometimes it's very hard for people to understand them. It's frustrating for people when they don't understand, especially when you have elderly people, elderly people have a hard time hearing anyway, mixed out with somebody.

They don't understand, they get frustrated really fast, and then they get frustrated with you because they're not understanding you need to have someone that they understand Filipinos. Some of them have just a slight accent, if any, and they are hysterically funny. Like I said, they watch our TV. They're educated, just like we are in the United States, except for pretty much everyone there goes on to secondary school, meaning they go onto college and university.

So they're very, well-educated, they're extremely intelligent, actually more so than the majority of Americans in the Philippines. Pretty much everybody has a degree. So they're, they're so smart and they want to please, you so much. So you give them a task to do they go at it and they will get it done. We love using virtual assistants from the Philippines.

It's one of our favorite places and one of the absolute best sites that you can use to get a virtual assistant. There's a lot of agencies out there, but. What I prefer is online jobs.ph it's online. O N L I N E jobs, J O B S all one word, online jobs dot P H standing for Philippines. Okay. So not.com but.ph.

Online jobs.page for like around 69 bucks or something like that. You can link yourself up with a bunch of different applicants and I'm talking hundreds of them most of the time. So let me give you a little bit of advice. When you go on to online jobs, you can create an account without having to pay for it right away.

So you can go on there and you can take a look around. And I do recommend you do, because there's a lot of training classes. Now, John has really upgraded the site since years ago when we were on it. I mean, it was good before, but it's really good now. So there's a lot of courses, classes that are going to teach you a lot about virtual assistants, things that you don't know how to train them, how to talk to them, how to pay them, like whatever questions you could possibly have.

It's all going to be on there. John even wrote a book and the book is amazing. I ordered it after our interview and it came pretty much right away. And we were joking about that too, because it's all virtual assistants who send everything out for him. So when you sign on, what you'll do is you'll create a job.

It'll say. Post a job. So you want to post a job and I suggest that you take a look at some of John's trainings on there. He's going to tell you how to create a job post, but once you do somewhere in there, we always hide something that gives people a little extra, something to do so that we don't just get a bunch of resumes thrown at us, but nobody really read our job description.

We might put something in there that says, please, if you're interested in this job, please attach your resume. And also your favorite viral comedy clip, or maybe a meme or a joke, or tell us your favorite joke or something. You can put anything you want in there. What's really cool is you're going to sort out a lot of people from that because as soon as you pay and you go live, okay, now, even up to this point, you don't have to pay for this, right.

Then all of a sudden you can post that and you can post it without paying for it. And as soon as you post that, literally within two days, when we put a post out, we would get a couple of hundred and two days of resumes coming at us. At this point, you have to decide, do I want to pay? You can read them and you can look at them, but you can't see any of their contact information until you pay.

And so all of that is free up until that point. So you can see, and you can take a look at a lot of these resumes. So even if none of those resumes look right for you, you never have to pay, but chances are, you're going to get a lot of resumes that look really good and you'll go through them. The first thing you're going to do is sort them out and say, who listened to us?

Who put the meme in there, or the viral video, and you can pick them out. If somebody didn't read through your entire job, description enough to catch that little job, you know, the little extra thing that they were supposed to do, then they're not going to be detailed oriented when it comes to their work.

Either. Now I've got a little tip and I don't know if John does this, but we actually. Do a personality test. I know this sounds really bizarre, but we go to a place called 16 personalities when we are screening our people and we've got it down to like a half dozen. We take them and we have them do a personality test because we have found out that working remotely means that they have to have a certain personality in order to organize themselves and get things done.

And it seems to us that pretty much all of them ones that we ever pick pretty much have the same similar features. It always works out really well for us. If you want that information, we created an entire mini course about how to hire a virtual assistant, but John's got a lot of free videos in there too.

So you can take all the information that John gives you. Or you can go onto our website and inside our store, you'll see our VA advantage. And the VA advantage is basically our mini course about how to hire virtual assistants. And it's got a lot of help. We even have scripts inside there and of course, winks to John's site.

So I like all his videos. He's got some great videos, like I said, so I can't get enough of the training that he gives because I always learn something new and. You know, we have a lot of tips and tricks that we have gotten from other people too. So if we put all of our knowledge together, we would have like amazing knowledge when it comes to virtual assistants, but John has been doing it for a while.

I do recommend you use his site, you know, using the 16 personality test using the secret question. All of those things can get you hooked up with some really great virtual assistants. Most virtual assistants are making about two 50 an hour. Now compare that to the United States. That's good money for them.

They're happy with that because their cost of living is so much lower. It's not a bad thing. It's a win-win scenario. Good for us. And it's good for them, especially when your businesses first starting out. And because they are on the other side of the continent. What's really cool is if you want to be answering your phone calls and your messages during the day, you can have somebody on the other side of the world answering your messages at night because it's daytime for them.

So that's really cool. So you, we have a variety of virtual assistants that do a variety of jobs. You know, what I'll do is I'll try to find the little clip because Chon, when he was doing his interview, he asked me what my virtual assistants do, and I just. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just spilled it. You know, I was like, they do this, they do this, they do this, they do this.

And he was like, oh my gosh, he goes, can you do me a favor after we're done with this? Can you send me this clip? He goes, because I want to use that on my site. And I was like, absolutely. So I sent it to him. It's so important that people realize your virtual assistants. They're extremely loyal. Filipinos, extremely loyal people.

I mean, they're good, good people. Good-hearted people, God-fearing people really good Christians. It's very rare. You're going to have something wrong, plus, I mean, you're not opening up your bank accounts to them. You're sending them money, but I always suggest that you be fair and good and honest to them.

They will be loyal to you till the end. Most people I know who have virtual assistants have had them for years and I'm talking years and years, John has had his virtual assistant. I think he said, is it 17 years or 22 years or something? I mean the same guy that he hired the very first time works for his company now.

And now he has dozens of employees. All in the Philippines and his entire company runs out of the Philippines and he works 17 hours a week. And that's all because his virtual assistants do it all for him. And they do it all for so much less that he can travel and do whatever he wants during the day. So virtual assistants are a really good way for you to free up your time, especially when it comes to messaging.

Scheduling. I mean, they do a lot of great stuff for you and they handle a lot of emergencies for us too. So I really, really recommend that. Now let's talk about, there are companies out there and they are called agencies. And the reason why John and I do not like agencies is first of all, they ream you for a lot of money a month.

So most of us paying our virtual assistants, two 50 an hour. It means that we're spending, you know, less than $500 a month. A lot of the agencies, when you get into an agency, they're going to charge you. And sometimes they charge you 750 a month, 650 a month, whatever they charge and believe it or not, they're not paying the employee nearly what we would be paying them when we do it ourselves.

Right. When we do it ourselves, what did I say? About two 50 an hour, right? They'll be paying them a buck 50 an hour or less, sometimes a dollar an hour or a dollar and a quarter or something. And they'll work them to the bone. They'll have them working for several different people to make up all 40 hours and they're not paying them very well.

So a couple of things are going to happen now. Remember. If you've been listening for a while, you've heard me talk about the differences between our Arizona and our Florida properties. When it comes to the minimum wage, the minimum wage in Florida is somewhere around seven 50. I think it's less than $8 an hour.

And I'm sure it's going up everybody's is going up, but there's a problem when it's that low, because Arizona, I think our minimum. Our minimum wage is about 12 or 13, 50 an hour or something like that. And so the difference is, think about this who can earn a living at seven 50 an hour? How can you pay a mortgage making seven 50 an hour?

I mean, it's just almost impossible. It really is an impossible task for working 40 hours a week. You're going to make $300, which is 1200 bucks a month. 1200 bucks a month. What is your mortgage? What is your rent? I mean, who doesn't have a rent for around a thousand a month? So think about that. Here's parents and people who are lower income, and you've got adults working for minimum wage, cleaning, apartments, and houses, and short-term rentals in Florida.

And you blow through them. Like water. I mean, you do, first of all, you blow through them because they've got to get a better paying job. And so they will be always looking for a better job. If somebody is only paying them $7 an hour or seven 50 an hour, it's not until somebody starts to make a decent wage that they can live on, that they can actually sit back and relax in the job because when you're only making 300 a week and you've got kids.

There's no way that's going to work. You just, that you cannot live on that. So people are working, their husbands are working. People are working two and three jobs. I mean, it's ridiculous, but if you're making $20 an hour, you know, 18 or $20 an hour, you're making almost three times that, right. So you're making about $800 a week.

And that helps out a lot, a lot. And with tips and things like that, I mean, it goes even up farther. So we like to pay our companies or we like to hire companies who pay their workers in Florida more. And we look, we want to know how much they're paying them, because if they're only paying the minimum wage, the kind of workers that are going to be going through our short-term rentals.

I mean, I'm a parent of an addict. Okay. So I'm not saying this to be ruder. I'm just being real with you. I don't want a bunch of tweakers going through my house. I don't want a bunch of people who look like they just got off a heroin bus because you can't have that. They're going into a property where it's worth a lot of money.

The things inside are worth a lot of money. There are times where we have had things missing from our properties years ago. It hasn't happened in a while because we are so much more careful now, but we've seen cleaners that were in there and I'm like, who the hell are you sending into my houses? I mean, these guys look like you got them off of a street corner and they were all literally doing drugs a half hour ago.

It's not good. It doesn't say anything good about your company and it sure as shit is not safe for me because they've got a code. They've got my cleaning code. Now my cleaning codes, we don't change every time, you know, we're starting to, but we never used to. And it was very, very unsafe. So. Think about that when it comes to cleaning companies, but also take that into regards.

When you're talking about these people that they're not paying very much in the Philippines, these people are working really hard. And what are they always looking for? They're always looking for a better job, something that's going to pay them more and if they can find it, they will leave. Because they have to, it's not that they wouldn't be loyal if you were paying them.

Well, a lot of people would be loyal if you paid them enough, they would be. But the thing is they have children to feed. They have bills to pay. They have mortgages, they have car payments, they have insurance, they have food. I mean, come on. It's expensive. So you want to give them a good, honest working wage.

And that my friends is the way to keep a virtual assistant, pay them a good, honest wage, these agencies, they don't. And so they're, we're going to go through them. You're going to get somebody trained and then they're going to be gone, or you're going to have to train somebody else. And it takes time every single time.

And the person who's making the most money off of that is always going to be the agency. And it's not a good thing. It really is not a good thing. There are some good agencies out there. Sure. But the agency is the one making the money and they're making the money off of the workers. That's why I like online jobs.

Stop pH online jobs.ph is just a better choice. It's better for everyone all around. Once you get a great VA. They're going to introduce you to more great VAs because they always know somebody, you know, somebody always. Yeah. I mean, it's just like you, when you were in school, do you remember when you were in high school?

And you knew of all your friends who had a job, where did they work? Remember where your friends worked? I remember where all my friends worked because when our friends were off of work or maybe when they weren't, we would all go to where they worked. I worked at movie theater. Do you think my friends did not show up at the multiplex theater that I worked in and Fox valley?

Heck YALI. Did they showed up all the time? Why? Because. Back then all the theaters were single theaters and to work at a multiplex one with one, two, three 12 theaters. I mean, it was crazy when multiplexes first opened, ever see the movie bachelor party and they were all running through the multiplexes.

That was absolutely nuts, but people love them. So my friends would show up and then. When we got off work, we'd all go to another friends. And if they were working at a restaurant, we would all show up there, big gang of us. Like, we need copies, we need pancakes. We need heroes. We need this. I mean, you run them around, but obviously we'd all tip and have fun, but we knew where all our friends worked and we knew when somebody got laid off, we knew what was going on.

And so people do, I mean, communities that still run like communities. It's like that in the Philippines, they know when somebody can take on extra work or needs to take on extra work, maybe they got laid off or maybe they just bought a new house or something. You know, they, a lot of parts of the Philippines, they can't afford a lot of electricity or gas.

So they very rarely cook on stoves. There. They rarely use ovens. They actually even rarely use. Washer machines. They wash things by hand because it's very expensive to live like that us helping them is it's basically our luxury for them. And they're very happy. It's amazing to me that more people don't use Filipino VAs.

They're amazing people. You're going to love that. I wanted to basically tell you the difference between using an agency and using a site like John's site. Now, John, his site. Is stellar. It's been recommended in a ton of courses. Get John's book. I think you can get his book at one VA away so you can use the number one VA.

Away a w a y.com or you can spell out the number one O N E VA a w a y.com. So just do one VA away and look for his book. It's the outsourcing lever. And it's only like $7. I think the book is free plus shipping and it it's amazing. I mean, it's really, really good. You're going to love it. It's an easy read and he's got everything.

Every question you would. Ever care to ask when it comes to virtual assistants, I really recommend you purchasing his book and getting that you're going to love it. Now I'm going to be talking in another episode about training your VAs, because we're going to talk about SOP again. Years ago, three years ago, when we began this podcast, we did an episode on SOP standard operating procedures.

And back then we used to keep a book like a physical book, and we would have a PDF on our own. Laptop or desktop of our SOP is all our procedures that had to do with everything. Right. And I think at that time, who did we use? I think we used process street or something like that. And we just created these checklists, but now.

Things have changed. I mean, even in the three years, things have changed a lot. Now we do everything by loom or Snagit, and I'm going to be discussing that in another episode for you. And I just wanted to thank you for listening today. And please, if you have the opportunity, go to wherever you are listening to this podcast from and leave us a five star review.

It will help us to pay for our bills because we have to pay for those do and podcasts are free, but that's only to you. They're not free to us. We have to pay for all the processing and the websites and everything that goes with it. So in order to do that, we'd like to get sponsors. And in order to get sponsors, we have to have a lot of subscribers and reviews.

So the more you leave us reviews. And subscribe to our podcast that helps us. I mean, tremendously. So I would really greatly appreciate you taking that extra effort. I know it's pain, but I do appreciate it. Have a great day. God bless you. And we'll talk to you next week. Go and grow.