How to hire a Philippines virtual assistant?

Many small and medium size businesses prefer to hire a virtual assistant instead of a fulltime employee to save cost and maximise the business benefits. Though there are many virtual assistant service providers across the globe, virtual assistants from Philippines are considered to be the most efficient and available at reasonable cost. These Filipino virtual assistants can help businesses, executives and solo-entrepreneurs with numerous tasks. Some of them being: administrative assistance, online research, formal business plans and presentations, travel booking or real estate management.

Most of the entrepreneurs are shifting their focus to outsourcing for a simple reason: cost efficiency and need to increase focus on important business goals. Outsourcing tasks to Filipino VA’s is not just an efficient decision but also guarantees that the task gets done.

In this article, we are going to understand how to unlock business potential and make it more profitable by hiring a Filipino virtual assistant (VA). In case if you want to hire a Filipino VA, you won’t want to miss reading this interview with self-made entrepreneur Jimmy Johnson from Miami, Florida.

Jimmy Johnson owns a travel & tourism related business in Florida in the United States. His business includes providing rentals, travel booking and water sports supplies. Established in 2010, Jimmy has always been on a look out for opportunities to expand his business. Jimmy started with a travel agency and by 2015 gradually had setup a complete travel & tourism platform, an ecommerce portal for water sports supplies and provides rental around Florida. In today’s interview we would discover Jimmy’s secret to unlock his business potential and how hiring a virtual assistant from the Philippines has helped him overcome some of the hurdles of his business.

In this interview you will learn:

• How to hire a Filipino virtual assistant?
• How much does it cost to hire a 40 hours per week VA?
• Step by Step guide to find, hire, train and manage a Philippine virtual assistant
• Tasks that you can assign to a Filipino virtual assistant

 

Transcripts of the interview:

Andy: Hello everyone, this is Andy from PhilippineVirtualAssistants.com, your one stop solution to learn about Filipino virtual assistants and hire them. We have been receiving a lot of enquiries on hiring a virtual assistant from Philippines, mostly whether it’s the right decision to outsource the tasks to a Filipino VA and how to find and train them. Having worked with Filipino VA’s and knowing how efficient they are, we wanted to give you all first-hand information on the process and so we have invited Jimmy Johnson from Florida. Today, Jimmy will share with us his experience working with a Filipino VA’s and give insights about his journey into the outsourcing world.

Andy: Hello Jimmy, thanks for being here on philippinevirtualassistants.com.

Jimmy: Hey, it’s a pleasure to be here and be helpful to my fellow entrepreneurs.

Andy: So to begin with tell us about your business, how did the idea of outsourcing come to you, how many Philippine VA’s do have working for your business right now?

Jimmy: Andy, let me give you a brief overview of my business first so that you understand the nitty-gritty completely.

Andy: Sure, we would love to hear more about it.

Jimmy: After my stint working in a leading manufacturing company, I decided to quit my job. It was mundane and there was no excitement. Hailing from Miami, I was always fascinated about the prospects of starting my own travel & tourism business. Everyone knows Miami is a hotspot for tourism not just within USA but also internationally due to its lovely beaches. It all started back in 2010, when I setup my first home rental business. The business was doing good enough to feed my family and for supporting day-to-day business running costs. However, I still felt there was more to be done. I was always fascinated by the prospect of taking my business online but had no clue of means to do so. Till that date I had survived on posting ads across Craigslist websites and local directories. That’s the most I did but I also knew there is more to be done.

Andy: Interesting! So how did you stumble across the term “virtual assistants” to be more precise “virtual assistants from Philippines”?

Jimmy: As mentioned earlier, I had no clue about the online industry, it’s just that my friend Ronald told me I should try outsourcing. Then a little bit of search around cheap outsourced resources etc. and I found about virtual assistant in Philippines. On further investigation, I realised what they could do and what I could achieve by hiring them.

Andy: Was hiring virtual assistant from Philippines a straight forward choice? How did you arrive to it? What did you look for?

Jimmy: Definitely not! Philippines was not something that came on the horizon initially. I had hired a virtual assistant from a different part of South-East Asia initially but he failed miserably. Not only did it took time for me to explain tasks to him, I struggled a lot in keeping up with budget goals and unfriendly work timing. It really didn’t work for me. All it helped me do was to get my priorities straight and better understanding of how the industry works.

I realised my top most priorities were to keep budgets low, get high quality work done within a defined timeframe and find someone trustworthy enough to share ownership of the business. I was not looking for an online VA but a virtual executive partner kind of thing.

Andy: Virtual executive partner! Sounds interesting. So, tell us more about your first Filipino VA.

Jimmy: I must say I was stunned & amazed!! I didn’t expect to find such fine resource in Philippines. So I started with the most mundane task i.e. Craigslist ads. I assigned the VA with 40 hour a week budget initially. I am glad I got a very friendly VA who was ready to work with me in my time zone, understand my requirement clearly, excelled in training that I gave and nailed the tasks I assigned. This VA just won my heart. He updated me regularly on things he did, new opportunities I should explore apart from Craigslist and eventually convinced me to start an online ecommerce portal and rest is history. I never realised how hardworking, sincere and trustworthy Filipino VA’s can be.

Andy: Wow! A VA did all that for you? Eventually you did find a online executive partner I guess.

Jimmy: Yes, I was pretty convinced in my heart I needed to expand my business. With the most mundane task outsourced and handled by this VA, I was able to give ample time to think about new strategies and expand the presence of my brand locally as well as globally. Taking my business online was one of the steps.

Andy: So you hired more and more VAs from same service provider?

Jimmy: Eventually yes! I need a virtual assistant team now that could help me take up the new business challenges. These new business challenges involved investment as well as dedication. I went on to hire a web designer who would make amazing HTML templates, a developer who would develop functionality with strong knowledge of PHP, content management systems, Javascripts, Ajax and CSS that delivers best customer experience, a graphic designer with knowledge of various designing tools such as Adobe Photoshop to maintain uniformity of look and feel across channels and create marketing collateral, search engine optimization specialist who could help in enhancing my local & global search presence, a social media manager who would help create a social buzz around my website and target users within specific interest group, content writer for user engaging content and last but not the least a customer service representative to manage all the customer queries via call or email.

Andy: So that’s a team of 6-7 VA’s? A big jump. Were they all from different virtual assistant service providers?

Jimmy: Yes, overall I had 10 VA’s with few heads to manage customer service and uploading the product catalogue as well. The idea was to keep the budget intact, hiring VA’s from different service providers around Philippines would have been an operation chaos. Especially at the time of expansion I wanted to focus more on productivity rather than operational hassle or juggling tasks between VAs. I chose to stick around my current VA service provider in Philippines.

Andy: A good strategy after all, to focus more on output than running behind the horses.

Jimmy: Yes, one must understand the need of his/her business and then chalk out a strategy. The strategy was not so bad after all. Sticking to a single service provider not only gave me operational benefit but also cheaper cost. I got great discount on the already low price, I got a customized billing option which enabled me to buy hours rather than resources and distribute it across the team, as and when I wanted.

Andy: This sounds pretty interesting. Tell me one thing, did you ever feel you have compromised on any aspect of business while going for cheap Filipino virtual assistants?

Jimmy: Definitely not. I interviewed all the resources for given skill set, understood their skill sets, trained and groomed them for my target audience and then deployed them for the task. I had to hire few local resources for this and had to setup a team in Miami as well to monitor and control the quality, give continuous feedback to VA’s and enable them to give desired output. My local team is relatively small with 3 members including myself and we are able to remotely manage a team of 10 VA’s hired from the Philippines.

Andy: Sound like a success mantra! So in one hand you got the quick turn around and on the other hand you had someone to monitor and report in case of any breach.

Jimmy: Yes, it did help me.

Andy: Any word of caution or advice you would like to share with our readers here?

Jimmy: Firstly, many users think a VA should understand everything in one go but one needs to realise without the right training effort, you would not be able to get desired outcome. So one piece of advice would be to spare some time for training the resources. Another would be to always validate and verify the reviews about VA companies, not all of them are trustworthy. The last would be in order to maximize the use of resources to have a clear strategy or goal for your business. Better the clarity, better the output.

Andy: Thanks a lot Jimmy for sharing your personal experience of hiring a virtual assistant from Philippines. I am pretty sure your valuable inputs would be of great help to our users.

Jimmy: No problem, thanks for having me here.