Episode 9: Outsourcing: Hiring the Right Person to Speed Up Your Business Productivity

Episode 9: Outsourcing: Hiring the Right Person to Speed Up Your Business Productivity

Brandon Schoen:
Some mistakenly, we've done this too, like sourcing where you give somebody a task, but then they repeatedly come back to you. Right. Where you're like, well, I didn't really delegate that. Like I just made them a task rabbit basically. And yeah. So it's kind of like, you're fully empowering that person to take ownership of that responsibility and you're not micromanaging them and they're not coming back to you everyday and asking questions. If you do it the right way, it's like you hand it off to them and you allow them to make a mistake. You'll allow them to own it. And you don't hound them for making a mistake because even you and I made so many mistakes, like trying to learn stuff or trying to do something the right way. So you got to give them a little grace. And even if you're starting out, you've never done this before. It's like the more thorough you can be with your outcome, your expectation, and then allowing them to own that task and just make a mistake and like.

Brandon Condrey:
But also make changes like the task. Is that all right? You're into it every day. I'm not doing it everyday anymore. Right. Do you see a better way to do it? Like you don't have to ask me for approval. Just change it. I care about the end result.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back everyone. To another episode of the Profit Cleaners this is Brandon Schoen

Brandon Condrey:
And Brandon Condrey here again.

Brandon Schoen:
In the house doing another episode to keep it clean for you guys and bring you some fresh value today. We're going to be talking about some really exciting stuff. Actually, that's going to free up your time, free up your life, get you back doing the stuff you love, which is the importance of outsourcing and what town source, where to find the best professional.

Brandon Condrey:
You're going to learn what we outsourced when and how we did it. And the screw ups we made along the way.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. And also if you guys stay till the end of this episode, a really cool little nugget we're going to leave there at the end is the template for a job posting, how we post jobs out sort of stuff. And a cool little trick that we use to make sure people are following directions. Make sure you attract quality candidates that are paying attention to the details right away. So make sure you stay tuned for that. And what else we got some housekeeping to do.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't done that. And if you really like what we're doing, leave a review, tell your friends that own service businesses about it. Lots of people could get some points out of us. So yeah, go for it, spread it around.

Brandon Schoen:
Spread it around. And I'm also make sure you guys check out the weekly mastercclass that we're still doing, like a live training, how to basically grow your cleaning business and attract way more recurring customers and a lot of value there as well. So go to Profitcleaners.com/masterclass to check that out and sign up for the free live coaching class we do. And without further ado, let's hop into the, to the show.

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it.

Brandon Schoen:
Alright. So we're going to talk about outsourcing. What does that even mean? Why would you outsource people are afraid of that word sometimes like, yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
We're not talking about hiring a call center in India to answer your phone. Although there are services that do that. That's just not one that we use.

Brandon Schoen:
Right!

Brandon Condrey:
So we're just talking about replacing maybe the Things that you do that you don't want to do, or that are just sucking up a lot of time. And they're just easy to hand off to somebody else to make your owner of the business time, more valuable, more applicable.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think what a lot of people get caught up in, especially we did in the beginning was, you know, you're starting out and you have to wearing all the hats. You're like the one dude running the whole show, right? So you have to do everything in the beginning on stuff, not everything.

Brandon Condrey:
But I mean really like when we started, you were cleaning toilets, I was answering phones. Like, what we're trying to do is balance out the minimum viable product, lean startup sort of situation where you just get it going, like get it out the door versus not getting trapped into doing that forever to grow like in our other episodes that we've kind of explained some sales techniques and things that you can kind of use to grow the company. Right. But realistically growth means more people more work. Right. So is there a bridge between hiring five people right away? Like you don't want to hire a CFO, a sales guy, a receptionist. You can't do that if you don't have any customers. Right. But is there a way to get you from all right. We have a few customers, I want more, how do I get to that part where I actually have all those people in house? And that's what we're talking about with Alex.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it's kind of like knowing that balance of when's the right time to do that and take that next step to like hire an employee or hire an office person or hire another team to help you. Like, if you're still doing the cleaning, like then hire a team to start cleaning for you and start, those are like me, but some of the first things you should start doing and actually kind of what got this all going is we started going through a couple of different books. One of them was Profit First.

Brandon Condrey:
Profit first by Mike Michalowicz which I think we've talked a little bit about before. And then another book by Mike Michalowicz it's Clockwork. And so clockwork is basically the very detailed blueprint on how to execute this, how to, you know, replace yourself within the business. We're going to do a whole episode on we'll just call it the Mike Michalowicz with this episode. I don't know we're going to we'll cover Profit first and, uh, clockwork and that, but just to kind of give you guys the heads up that that's where a lot of this is based off of. And so we'll put some links in the show notes to go pick up those books. If you want to get a head start before that episode, It comes out.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I would say it's like hand in hand because what Profit first really helps us with was getting back that money. It's like getting back, you know, the lack of money, whereas clockwork is getting he's tackling the lack of time. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
So Profit first side, that's a good segue into kind of the first hire we made that wasn't a cleaner. So in before Profit first, we would get to a payroll overdraft or account by several thousands of dollars. Luckily our bank was nice about it, but we were just stuck in this loop where we were, we knew we're constantly in the negative whenever we ran payroll, right. Profit first helped us solve that problem to get to the time thing. I remember you pushing me like, Hey, we gotta hire an admin person to help like answer the phone and stuff. And my push back was, how are we going to pay this person? If we're already over drafting the roll account every time, how are we going to do it? And so I resisted it for weeks months. Maybe. I don't know how long before I finally was like, alright, we got to do it. There's no way around it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it was just monumental, like the shift that happened as soon as we did do that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, man. I was like, Light speed. I wish we'd done it the day that you told me to do it. You told me in your other companies that this is the first hire we make, we always hire a virtual sort of admin to help tackle this stuff. And I was like, Oh, we can't, I'm a control freak. I got to keep everything under where I can see it and you know, touch it and move buttons and stuff. And so in the end it was kind of confronting a fear about trusting someone else with a baby. Really? This is our baby. Right. We have together this business, which is going to do lots of things for us in the future. But like, I just don't want to hand that over to like someone that we found on Craigslist, like how do you do that? So it was a big leap to be able to do it. But man, it was a huge change.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It was like this huge weight lifted is, and this is also goes on you, you've got to hire the right person and train them and have the right processes in place too. But what we noticed I think was just huge weight lifted, right? Like we were able to concentrate on more, maybe designing the business, doing higher level stuff, like generating more sales, doing more marketing.

Brandon Condrey:
What happened right away? Is that okay, I'm in the office answering phones, you're dealing with customer complaints. You're dealing with billing. Like I got to change his credit card or you're opening the mail. Cause you're the CEO. So you gotta make sure this bill gets paid and blah, blah, blah. And then you're also dealing with the employee issues that were happening during the day. Like we're locked out of this house. How do we get in? I'll call them. Hold on. Yeah. So we were both so busy with that, that it left. Not so much time to actually bring in new customers. Right. We've got advertising out there, but we don't have time to actually run out and do the estimates because we were so slammed. So what hiring Claudia - Claudia was our first non cleaner hire. And what hiring Claudia did was she took up all the stuff that I realized after the fact that I hated to do so in the beginning, I was just like, this is the business. This is what I got to do. But she took on phone, answering billing, scheduling, dealing with the teams during the day she spoke Spanish. So she was dealing with the teams without using Google translate and slowing everything down. Right. And so it was perfect. And so what that freed me up to do was make sure all the operations stuff is done, like the boring, nuts and bolts of running a business with bill pay and all that stuff. But then to really be out in the field doing sales 24, seven as much as possible, right. That was what allowed us to kind of take a first leap in growth was more sales cause I had more time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think what all this kind of comes back to is just this core principle that we've heard forever. This is cliche probably, but work smarter, not harder. Right. And it's right. It's just like, how can you create this environment where you're systematizing things or putting people in specific roles where they're adding so much value, freeing up so much of your time. So you can keep going so much faster, which is really what Claudia did for sure from the get go.

Brandon Condrey:
And that was eye opening. And you know, in my mind, Claudia is one in a million, I think she's awesome. And she was amazing. But in reality, Claudia, isn't one in a million. If you craft the job post correctly and you got the training sort of set up on the back end, you can find someone like this in your neighborhood. I, you know, we can't clone Claudia, but you can find one in nearby.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And I would just say too, like when we started, I know a lot of people start cleaning themselves. Like we did a little bit, but we like, that was a part of our business plan was to immediately have an inventory of people to servicing and deploying the product out to the market. So I would say that's even probably our very first outsourcing was the Cleaners.

Brandon Condrey:
Well, totally. I mean, yeah. So the first outsourcing was we're not going to Clean. Right. But we only had three people. So if someone called in sick, sometimes we did have to go. Great. So that was a thing. Those are crazy. Claudia was the first sort of non cleaning professional that we hired.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I would also say right about that time, we were experimenting with doing what you mentioned just a little bit ago, which was a virtual assistant where, um, we didn't quite have that person yet, but like you mentioned, a lot of the other businesses I've run have been online and we've always had a virtual assistant, which is someone that's never really full time. They're more of a contract worker will tell you where to get some of these people here, here in a sec, but I'm really, there starts to become a lot of these like small mundane tasks, minutiae tasks that are just like bogging you down. Like you said, updating credit card or running a billing report or doing something like that on the backend.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we did hire a virtual assistant and that was really close to the time that we had hired a Claudia. Right. But the virtual assistant who is overseas and works opposite hours, we assign her a bunch of tasks that she's able to do overnight, basically that don't require customer interaction. So in our case, our pricing for cleaning is based off of square footage, One of the things that we do to prepare that estimate is verify the square footage and the way that we do that is with tax records. So we're looking up on the County website, how big is this address? And that was part of the time suck for me is like, okay, now I got out into the field and I'm doing estimates, but I was prepping the estimates myself in between estimates and having this gap of time. Right. Well, when we gave that to Elmie, she would do it overnight. And so all the next days sales were prepped for me. And so like, I didn't have to do anything. I could just show up to a house. Here's your stuff. Here's that we already verified your square footage. And some people like, Oh man, where'd you find that number? I'm like, Oh, we looked it up on public records. That again, just even expanded the sales more because then I was able to squeeze more of them in, in a day because I didn't have to leave that gap for prep. I didn't have to have that buffer.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think it's a lot of those little things, like in the beginning, those little things that kind of slow you up, like we weren't even able to answer the phone sometimes because we were like juggling 10 other things and a customer complaint and an email over here. And, but I remember even in the early days with Elmie some, one of the first things she helped us do was go through our software and like scrape a bunch of data and like update some address info. I don't know what it was, but it was just like hours, hours of like mindless numbing, crazy work. That would really crazy. And we didn't even have time to do that.

Brandon Condrey:
So No. So she helped us update that she updates those customer things overnight. She is screening voicemails that come in. So we know that first thing in the morning, these are the ones that have to be rescheduled. They called an overnight and said, my kid's sick. I need to do it. So like we tackle those first and then the rest of them just kind of get put into a queue. So it helps Claudia prioritize her morning as well. So which things should I tackle first instead of reading through the whole list of stuff that came in? Yeah. So the virtual assistant was great with minor things. We ended up hiring a second virtual assistant to kind of help me deal with some finance stuff. They help us do the Profit first bank transfers and some reporting that I do. So you've called me the spreadsheet in jail. A couple of times being a spreadsheet engine, if you're going to do it yourself, you got to go look up the data and plug in the data into the spreadsheet, right. With the virtual assistant and zip, we were able to have someone else look up the data overnight, plug it into this spreadsheet. Zapier does the fancy formatting. And then I just come in in the morning and look at a dashboard. Right. And so that also was a good hire, like I've never regretted any of our outsource. Right?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think, you know, how I kind of think of it too, is Elmie or our virtual assistant who by the way, is in the Philippines. And for years and years and years, I would say 10 years now, I've had people I've worked with in the Philippines. They are amazing, amazing people to work with for outsourcing, because I can go on and do a whole bunch of details here. But basically they just are super loyal. They are super reliable. They have a great amount of respect for America. We saved their butt in the war and Japan was bombing them or something like that. So we things like that on their history. And I kid you not, I've worked with all these different outsourcers from China to Pakistan, to like the middle East, like all over the Slavic countries. And it always comes back to the Filipinos are like, they just outperform everybody. They always show up. They don't complain. They just, they do the work and it's awesome to work with them. So I would highly recommend if you're looking for like a virtual assistant for maybe handling like lower level tasks, like we were talking like running billing or reports or stuff in the back end, this is super low level, but it needs to get done. That's a great position for the Filipino virtual assistant. Yeah. Whereas the financial person that we hired was actually in the country and that required a little more high touch. They needed to be on our time zone.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I needed to be able to talk to them during the day, interact with them without having to wait like six hours for them to come back. So we'll, we'll cover how you could do it at the end, but okay. So we got our two virtual assistants, we got Claudia. The next hire we made was basically a duplicate of Claudia. We hired another person in the office. Right. And so Claudia was unable to pass off some of her stuff, they kind of split. So one of them's going to manage teams and one of them is gonna manage customers. And so that's a W2 full time employee with us. So there's two people in the office, two people virtual, and then you had done some outsourcing with the marketing and the website. So tell people about that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So like in the beginning, just like we're saying guys, sometimes you gotta do, you gotta do. But like in the beginning we bootstrapped and we built the website and it was, it was pretty good. But you know, like we ended up outsourcing that actually just really recently I'm outsourcing that. And with some of the other outsourcing, like, honestly, just to go back to what, when we started like this, isn't something you have to just right out of the gate, have a full time person. Like I think Elmie, our virtual assistant in the Philippines, she started like one or two hours a week. You know, it's all we could afford.

Brandon Condrey:
Same with the finance VA. And she's also just a couple hours a week right now. And we're going to, we're going to maybe hand off payroll student, like, that'll take up a little bit more, but the point of having a virtual assistant that's on a contract basis is that you're not W2 doing them and guaranteeing that they're going to get 20 hours as a part time employee. You're just, they'll ask span. And like, you know, the flip side of that is that you're not their only customer. Like they're helping other people do the same thing, but when they're working for you, they're just working for you. Right. But yeah, you can, in the beginning you think like, Oh man, I don't need a part time assistant. Like, you're fine. But if you freed up five hours of yourself over a given week, what could you do in that five hours that you're not doing right now? Right. Could you design a new marketing campaign? Could you go door hanging? Could you hire a kid to go do door hanging? Or you just map out the neighborhoods you want the door hangers to go. There's ways to leverage your time by getting rid of simple stuff. You're not talking about getting rid of hiring or dealing with the customers. Like if you enjoy talking to the customers, keep that part. But if you are short on time, get rid of the stuff that you know that someone could do with an internet connection.

Brandon Schoen:
So, Right. And I think what it comes down to is this idea of like organizational or operational efficiencies and doing more with less resources, even, you know, and, and even, you know, you are working smarter, not harder. And you're finding those people like Claudia, who fits that role perfectly of customer service. And she's on the front lines of doing that. And so you try to match those strengths with those roles, right? And then you're offloading simultaneously offloading time. Now you're freed up your time. So maybe, yeah, maybe you're focusing on something else, higher level, like you're designing a marketing campaign or something else that will generate revenue for the business. Or maybe you're just generating free or time that you can do something else that you love. Or you can go do something with your family, but you're not burning out is the point. And you're freeing up time.

Brandon Condrey:
You can pick up your kid from school. Like if you free up those hours per week, then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you leave at two o'clock to go get your kids. Like something like that. Yeah. We got the marketing person that was doing SEO and the website and lots of tasks got pushed off to this one company, which has been great. And we pay them on a contract basis and it's cheaper than hiring someone still. And even though it's the most expensive version of that, that we've used so far, we did start with a local SEO person who was what we needed at the time. And then when we outgrew it, we moved on to something that was focused on cleaning.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. We even started, I'm just going to spill the beans here, where we start, we do a lot of these hires, but it's on Upwork. And we started a lot of our marketing and different things on Upwork because now we have transitioned it over to a larger agency. That'll handle more of that. But like, yeah, you've just wherever you're starting out. That's the beauty of freelancing is you can be like, I only have this many dollars to spend on ads this month or SEO this month or whatever it is that you want to do to grow your business. And so the beauty of freelancers is they can be like, that's great. Whereas when you go to a bigger operation, they might need a contract where it's a lot more and you have to pay it every month. And so this is a little more in between where you can kind of ramp up to the next level, which is where we're at now, what you mentioned, which is like, we have somebody, it used to be a local SEO guy and he kinda, you kinda didn't do some things so well. And so we, we fired them and we moved to another company. That's now handling SEO and Google ads. And we have another guy managing Facebook.

Brandon Condrey:
And they've got a chat bot that talks to customers for us. The nice thing about Upwork too, is that you can hire people for a project basis. Like we've talked about virtual assistants that work with us consistently week over week. But when we got zip, you're going to get all those fancy spreadsheets going. You hired a dude from Russia that just designed the zaps are what they're called the actual programming on how to take this number, do X and then drop it into this other thing. And that was a one time thing. And we've gone back to him, I don't know, two or three times, and we needed some tweaks here and there, but you're not just cause you're hiring a virtual assistant or a project consultant or whatever. It doesn't mean that you're married to them for 10 hours a week.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And even if their hourly rate is a hundred dollars an hour, you might only need them for 10 minutes to just look over something, some snafu that happened or something broke or whatever. And you're like, Hey, I don't know what happened. Can you fix that real quick? And it's not always this huge bill that it's just very, it's like chunks as you need it kind of as needed.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah. Upwork is a wealth of everything. Like they've got categories, you can find all kinds of things in there and you know, stick around to the end. And we'll give you a little bit of tidbits on how to, how to post the right job description within Upwork. Yeah. The other thing, after we did the SEO stuff, we were able to hire a friend of mine. Who's doing part time sales on this one was huge for me. This took off my plate. Something like 25 hours a week is what I've been estimating. And he's able to do more estimates than I was because I was only doing estimates on three days a week would look more like two and a half because we had, I was dealing with running a business. So like I had certain days where I had to be in the office all day so that I could do things like process payroll. But the point was, he's going to come in work consistently right now he's only part time. So he was one to 5:00 PM every day. But because he's consistent with those hours, our estimate calendar, the amount of customers that we could put through the pipeline more than doubled. And so he's doing up to like 30 of these a week and on a good week, I was doing like 12.

Brandon Schoen:
It's also because we trimmed that process instead of going out in person, it's all virtual on zoom now. So he can pack in like twice as many estimates. Thanks card. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we're more efficient now and you're also not doing it. So it's like now you have all this time freed up to do, not only what you love, but also the higher level stuff. Like really this is getting you from doing, doing, doing, which is what a lot of people get bogged down in the weeds of their business to actually designing your business and working in the higher level stuff that actually it's like the visionary stuff that moves you forward, that gets you the bank Boom. And like the motion, you know?

Brandon Condrey:
So with sales, like I recorded a bunch of virtual estimates that we did over zoom. I let Matt watch those estimates. We kind of got the flow down, right. Then I sat in on a couple that he did and that was there to jump in and answer any questions that might come up. Right. And then he's been on his own ever since. So it was like three days of training. And then every now and then he'll shoot me a message saying like, Hey, there's this weird thing that wasn't covered. Like, it's just something that he hasn't seen before, but he never asked the same question twice. And you know, he's planning on going full time, you know, whenever that's convenient for him, but right. It's been that one was monumental. So that type of thing, like once you're comfortable with it, like as soon as you get into the outsourcing, you get rid of this small task, you realize that the world didn't implode the business, didn't destroy itself, overnight bills. Didn't go unpaid. Right. You're like, okay, great. Now I can maybe expand it. Like it gets a little bit addicting. Like you need to get rid of this and get rid of that. And then my quality of life right now has never been higher. I really know, like I spend my kids doing virtual school right now. Like a lot of people's kids are, I'm guessing because of the pandemic. And so I'm able to stay at home on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings and make sure that she's getting signed into stuff. I still have a full day at the office every week. I take half days on Fridays.

Brandon Schoen:
We were able to work out today. Both of them.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. We worked out there, Saw our personal trainer. That's a trade. We clean his house and he teaches us how not to be fat. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
So the things that actually matter that give you back so much of your life that you can like keep driving forward. That's what this frees up is that time to do those things. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
The last one, the most recent one that we did is this one I struggled with in the beginning. But like, I guess I did with Claudia too, but you just, you just learn it as you go on. Right? So we hired, what's called a fractional CFO and she comes with a bookkeeper. So they give us X amount of hours per week. The CFO, you bounce ideas off of you say, Hey, we're thinking about moving the office to Colorado or something like that. Right. And they'll be like, Oh man, for you to be able to do that, you're going to have to do this, that or the other thing, or here's what you need to organize. Or these are your tax implications. So the CFO's very knowledgeable in that area. And I didn't even know that you could do this. I didn't know that you could hire a CFO, not just part time, but just like you're working three hours a week and your bookkeeper's tight to you and they're helping keep our books. Yeah. We had outsourced books Keeping that was one of the very first things we did with a company called Bench. And they kind of connect to QuickBooks and manage stuff for you. And we outgrew them. And then we switched to a different company that folded, and now we're with this CFO, but the CFO is what I think is like the end result for us. And we'll stay with them until we all go to them to the point where we need an in house CFO. Yeah. I bet the CFO or the fractional CFO will help us hire that person because they know what to look for.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of what it comes down to, because at some point you're like, yeah, I want to do everything I want to, but you really don't. You don't want to be expert at everything. You don't want to also have to learn how to do graphic design and billing and software and marketing and sales. Like you want to focus in on what your strengths are, what you're really good at and do that and let someone else delegate it to someone else who, even though you're, you go, might get in the way. And you're like, Oh, I could probably do it better. Well, if you give them the right process and the training, like they probably can't do it better than you and you just gotta let it go.

Brandon Condrey:
They're specialized. So of course they can do a bit of yeah. When you're scatterbrained like that, you're going to be a Jack of all trades, but a master of none. Right. You need to niche into the design of the business. Like if that's the thing that you want to do, you want to be the big visionary and make it go bigger, then that's what you need to focus on. So you have to hand off all the other bits and pieces, right. If you really like doing the customer stuff, like then stay on top of the customers. Like maybe they really like having an ear of the owner. Like whenever they talk to you, that's fine. But then outsource the other stuff. Right. Okay. So we covered like where we got to write what we hired when we did it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I just want to add one other thing from clockwork and what we're going to do. And again guys, a whole another episode in clockwork, but kind of the framework he uses there is there's the 40 mix of any business, which is doing deciding, delegating and designing. And you want to, most businesses are really highly focused on doing and you want to move your focus more towards designing and that's where you really get the momentum and the big strides when you're designing where your business and the flow of your business and how the best person for that role is doing that thing. Right. But just back to delegating really quick, like that's why we need to elaborate more on this altogether. It's just because it's a fine art and science of doing all this. And really when you're delegating, it's like some mistakenly we've done this too. Like, I've done this a lot of times outsourcing where you give somebody a task, but then they repeatedly come back to you. Right. Where you're like, well, I didn't really delegate that. Like I just made them a task rabbit basically. And so it's kind of like, and we're going to get all into this. Like you said, recording videos and how to actually create these processes to hand off. And, but when you fully delegate, when you fully outsource guys, it's like, you're fully empowering that person to take ownership of that responsibility and you're not micromanaging them. And they're not coming back to you every day and asking questions. If you do it the right way, it's like you hand it off to them and you allow them to make a mistake. You allow them to own it. And you don't hound them for making a mistake. Cause even you and I made so many mistakes, like trying to learn stuff or trying to do something the right way. So you got to give them a little grace. And even if you're starting out, you've never done this before. It's like the more thorough you can be with your outcome, your expectation, and then allowing them to own that task and just make a mistake. And like.

Brandon Condrey:
But also, but also make changes to the ownership of the task. Is that all right? You're into it every day. I'm not doing it every day anymore. Do you see a better way to do it? You don't have to ask me for approval. Just change it. Just change about the end result with sales. I care that you closed this many customers over a period and you hit a goal. Right? I don't want you to change it to the point where you're lying to them about what we're doing, but like you can alter your pitch, however you want it. Like, I just did it because that's the way that I talk. But you have a different way of doing it. You tell jokes, like whatever, like yeah, change it. However you want it. Like that's totally fine.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And like, things are going to like a process or a piece of the software you're using might change or the market might change. So you allow that person to have full ownership so they can make, be like, I see a better way to do it, or actually the process on the back end change. So this is going to change a little bit and they're now able to fully own that. And like, it just, it doesn't bog you down. Cause they're not coming back to you every time to ask questions. It's like now the company is just freely flowing and tasks are getting done and they're owning that stuff. And that's really what we're talking about here is to free up that time. And you're now designing that flow and working on the tire level stuff and then In the business.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah. Okay. So we told you guys what we've outsourced so far, how we did it when we did it, the mistakes we made along the way, I think were mostly related to not doing it sooner. So if we were starting from scratch and we had our knowledge, what I would do differently is we would have launched the company with a virtual assistant into like right away. We've already got one right away. And you know, it might take a couple of weeks of us figuring stuff out to get you some tasks, but right away, you're in it. You're learning the company as we're learning. Right. So here's your thing. You're gonna figure it out. You can prep estimates, you can look up and you can take the customer data that went into Asana and copy it into our CRM, which is not connected to the internet. So like that stuff like that would have been the given right away. And then once we bottomed out to strong word, once we got a little bit busier and we were spending too much time on the phone, on the sales, started to dip that's when we would have made the poll to get someone in the office right away. Right. And so, you know, like you could talk about, we need more funding to do all that. But the way that we hired a Claudia is that we were paying Corby our mentor consultant. We had a consulting agreement with him and I had written him an email saying like, Hey, we are slammed. I need to hire someone in the office, but I needed to be able to pay them. And so what made me feel better about it was just that he was like, yeah, take a holiday from the consulting payments for like six months. And so we didn't pay him for six months and that was able to allow us to pay Claudia while we trained. Right. So to redo it, like, I wouldn't worry so much about finding the funding to cover someone right away. If you have zero revenue, we obviously have a problem, but ticket pickup, man, like if this person's going to save your skin and save you time, then don't pay yourself for a month or two, whatever it may be and then use those funds to get it because the payoff will be the time to increase the sales and the revenue way faster than we did in the beginning.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think it even goes back, We started doing some of the cleaning, but really from the get go, we outsourced that cleaning so that we could have time to generate those sales, do the marketing and do the operational stuff right away. And so I think if you're still doing the cleaning, like.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, as soon as possible from a priority standpoint, if you are still actively cleaning with, maybe it's just you, but maybe it's you and you hired someone to help you. Clean you got to hire someone to replace you. You gotta hire yourself. So you can actually spend some time in the office. Yeah. Then you're doing the office stuff during office hours instead of after you're done cleaning. Yeah. Then get yourself a virtual assistant hand off. Some of the easy stuff could be in your time zone could be overseas, whatever. Like you need the internet. Here's how to do it. Yeah. And then just keep going. Like if you just think about it, you can outsource lots of stuff. You can outsource ads. We outsourced our logo design in the beginning. You can outsource the website. If you're a business owner already, you know that you're getting hit up for SEO spam all the time anyway. But like, you gotta do your research. Like don't just jump at the first thing that comes to you. Right. But that's why we've got this little tidbit of information we're going to do, like show you how to do this little trick.

Brandon Schoen:
Exactly. So, um, so just real quick guys, like some of the sites that you can use to outsource Upwork, we already mentioned is a fantastic site. It used to be called a oDesk or something else before, but Upwork is tremendous because you can not only find really high quality people on there, but you can, they have this cool, like time-tracking software. So like you can actually see when they log in and what they're doing. Like, so, you know,

Brandon Condrey:
They take screenshots of what they're doing on their computer. So if you get a screenshot back of them browsing the internet, then you can dispute and not pay that.

Brandon Schoen:
That's happened before. And I'm like, Hey, what were you doing over here? And they're like, Oh, whoops, I forgot that. You know, whatever. Um, but normally, you know, just, just that kind of a peace of mind that, you know, like I can see what they're working on. Even if they're across the world, I can see all their reviews. I can see other people have vetted them. So I know they're good. It's not just some random dude off trig's list that I'm going to entrust my business to. Right. So Upwork is amazing. And we're going to have a link for that in the show notes. Fiverr is a really cool one, but it's more, they've come a long way, but it's a little bit lower level sometimes. Like you might not always get the highest quality people or, you know, it's just faster turnover type stuff, but check out five or two. Um, they've got a lot of really cool stuff or even just a spark ideas. Like what kind of work you can even outsource. They have all sorts of categories on there when we first started me and I think the first thing we outsourced was our logo on and we use 99 designs To do that.

Brandon Condrey:
99 designs is so cool. You post a job, how much you willing to pay for it. And then we got submissions from Romania, India, China, all over the world. And like two, 300, we actually chose was based in Romania. And so that design package we had chosen was our logo business cards. I think we got some letterhead out of it. And we've used that Ever since, ever since.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And then you get like, it's like crowdsourcing for design. You're like two or 300 designers giving a design As opposed to like one. And you're like, ah, I don't know. So much more variety to choose from. And you really have a good feel for what you like and what you want. So that's a really cool one for logo designs. So just in general for like quick, even to do it yourself a little bit, like Canva is a really cool design tool that you can use just to make quick social media graphics or blog posts.

Brandon Condrey:
Okay. I have lots of templates that you can kind of base it off of. It's pretty easy.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. But really guys like where this all started kind of what it was years ago when I had internet businesses, I was went through a course and it was, it's kind of a weird mindset shift to think of this this way. But when you're outsourcing, the whole idea is to replace yourself. Right. And you're like, Oh, replace myself. I don't want to replace myself. Like, it sounds scary, but really you want to replace yourself. That's the whole idea in essence of business is so it can run without you. It can be automated. It can be fluid, like run like clockwork. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
So, but you still get paid.

Brandon Schoen:
But you'll get paid. Right. Cause you've designed this flow in these systems.

Brandon Condrey:
You designed a machine that manufacturer's money.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And so just like real quick, like the We'll give you guys the template for a job post and some examples and things. But a tip that I learned a long time ago, that's gone a long way. Outsourcing is just when you write that post, like essentially you want to say specifically as possible, here's what I need. You know, here's all the details and be as specific as possible and what the outcome, what the expectations are. But just so you can find, cause sometimes you'll post these jobs and you'll get like a hundred or 200 people that applied to them. You're like, well, what the heck? How do I even sift through all this? I'm a little trick that we've used is just post at the very end of your job, posting a little snippet of text that says reply to this job post with the keyword. And we use sunshine a lot or it can be whatever you want, but you use a certain keyword that designates and that helps you know, that that person is paying attention. Not only have they seen your job post, they're not just hitting reply with a copy paste template. They've read through your whole job posts. They read to the last line of your job post that says reply in the title of your reply of your job. You know that you want this job sunshine or some other words, some other keyword that designates that, okay. Now I know this person knows that I know that they're following directions. I know that they're like attention to detail is high because this is a small detail in this job post. And they followed that direction or that detail we've even gone so far. And my more recent job posts to have someone send a video to us.

Brandon Condrey:
I liked that one. I like having them send a video cause you kind of get to hear them speak passionately about why they want the job. And if they're, if they're too nervous to record the video, then I don't know. Maybe it's not a good

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it actually weeds out the people that go the extra mile, which you want people to have a great attitude to have a go getter attitude. Like even with the Cleaners we do this too. And a lot of them send us videos and we're like. wow, that was awesome. Like that person has that drive. They want the extra mile and that already separates them from the pack. You know? So it's just one little tool, one little nugget that will help you guys. When you're doing these job posts is just put something in it that allows you to know that that person on the other end is paying attention. And you see them already from day one, you gave them a task and you assigned it to them and they follow directions right away. And that's like the quickest way to know that that person's already reading the details following directions. The next thing I would do is give them an one more small task and be like, Hey, do this log into our software or do this run a quick report and report back to me, that's all just something small. Just let them do it and see how they respond to see how they fall through that. And if they do it, then that person's a good candidate, you know, like look at the rest of their reviews and ask them some more questions, maybe set up a phone call with them if they're even if they're overseas, but especially, you know, if they are in town, they can come in and do an in person interview or something or a zoom call. But those are just some quick tips guys that I think will help you out a lot and finding higher quality people and just get you on the road to freeing up your time, freeing up your life and working smarter, not harder, you know?

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. So, so thanks for listening guys. Hopefully you're able to take that info and hire your first virtual assistant. If you haven't had one already or your first cleaner, if you're still cleaning houses. Yeah. But you know, don't forget to subscribe and review. That's always very helpful. Tell anyone that you did, you know, that likes cleaning companies and.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And keep it Clean guys.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it. Clean thanks.

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