Smart Business Moves with Guest Greg Shepard

hi good afternoon here tom stewart with service smart business moves i'm switching gears forgive me i should be getting good at that now um getting a little bit of a late start here but uh liz can explain all those details how are you doing liz i'm well tom how are you doing today well i mean i can see since you're running late that you're not doing as well as you could be but it's okay it's all right how are you doing greg i'm doing great hey guys thanks so much for inviting me back on your uh on the program i appreciate that and i'm pretty excited about this because i think it's really good information you're about to cover here yeah i don't think there's a person out there it's not excited about figuring out how can they get more administrative help for their business more support staff if you will where you know especially you know if you can tap into a higher caliber talent at a lower price point i mean that's not to like about that right not kidding exactly before and you know i'm so surprised more businesses aren't doing this um leveraging you know overseas talent for their own business you know with the uh the wage differences the living standard difference is you're able to get some top talent for you know the fraction of the price that you've paid here yeah i i can't wait to i i've got a blank sheet of paper in front of me to take all my notes here today normally i just jot on like whatever scratch people pic piece of paper i see today i'm like i'm prepared only one piece of paper liz yeah i got my journal in case i need more it's okay all right you gotta use that good handwriting yeah i do have tiny writing so uh before we get uh before we forget why don't we just go over our schedule for uh for the balance of the week obviously we know what we're doing today with with greg um tell us a little bit about cassie liz uh so cassie is my son's girlfriend fiance and she is in the medical field she is um currently in school she'll tell you what she's doing but she's um in nursing school and her entire family is in the medical medical realm so she has just some insight into what's going on and what she's actually seeing versus what uh you know we hear a lot of these rumors and it's hard to know what's true what's not true well i can tell you what cassie's going to tell us is going to be the truth at least from her perspective here in olympia washington and and what we're seeing so i thought it would be interesting and wednesday as a holiday is joining us i wonder how many people out there know aja oh it's shocking to me if anybody doesn't know her because she's so amazing but i guess it makes sense that people might not know her for sure tom so um has been laura smith's um operations manager for oh gosh i don't know how many years she'll tell us how many years but a while and she has gone through the ringer with some stuff and she's going to talk to us about uh the different struggles how how things are for an operations manager versus for for the owner of the company and she's going to give us some insight into what we're looking for in a good operations manager and some of the things that we need to stop doing to keep good operations managers because they they don't they don't grow on trees y'all some of you know that already now if you really think about this you know if they had an all-star team for operations managers asia would be on it she'd probably be the captain um and to get that type of insight in terms of you know this is how you make that relationship work and this is what you need to be looking for and this is how you need to manage that relationship that's uh this might this might be one of the more valuable uh discussions that we we've had on sport business absolutely so i i'm creating a list of questions um that i know i want to have answered if anybody else has any questions that they think they're going to want to know from aja feel free to reach out all right speaking of questions that brings us to thursday which is on the spot thursday our rapid fire q and a session where liz myself and our special guest each get one minute to answer your most pressing questions do you have a hint as to who our secret guest is for this thursday uh so an interesting fact about this guest is that he um at one time owned a mall m-a-l-l mall yeah okay not like uh some type of crude ham or use but like a no double l's shopping mall a shopping mall that's a unique uh person right there and i'm i'm thinking i may have just blown who this person is because anybody that knows someone who owned a mall probably only one of them out there but well i don't see anybody guessing yet so we'll keep an eye on that yeah greg can you see on the right hand your screen where uh comments are showing up oh yeah let me get over there all right hey denise okay i'm gonna silence my phone before i go on try all right greg you want to go ahead and uh get us started and just maybe give us a little bit of background as to how you uh first started using overseas talent and how that evolved and take it any way you want to go sure and i don't remember what brought me to using uh overseas talents um i forgot i i just somehow stumbled upon i remember uh odesk um i use upwork but it used to be yeah there's a lot of platforms online where you can use and connect business owners with workers and the great thing about this is that it's not limited to the united states that means you're able to find good talent overseas um in places where the cost of living differs wildly i actually uh i was talking to you earlier time i actually did a blog post on this topic just get my thoughts straight and one of the examples of my blog post is venezuela now i have a writer in venezuela great guy does awesome awesome work in minnesota right now the minimum wage is around four cents per hour four cents usc per hour uh of course you know you get up to 10 20 cents but he's making 350 an hour dollars 50. three three dollars and three cents per hour so he is banking now what this means when you can leverage overseas talent like that you're able to get the cream of the crop because the local businesses over there can't compete with your western uh with your wages uh coming from the u.s or europe or what not so there's virtually no competition to get the best talent you just have to know how to find the well is talents what you're going to share with us today i would be glad to um and and if you were with us uh the other week when greg was here he pointed out that backlinks are a really good way to improve your seo if you heard what he just told us he wrote a blog article on this so i suspect when we're done he's going to share that link with us and we're going to take that link and we're going to put it on our resource page on cleaning business today and that's yet another backlink so he can maintain that first page status for not one but two clean companies in the city of dallas well thank you i appreciate that i know we we appreciate their coming and sharing all of these like awesome tips with us to get any oh no ideal candidates karen well probably after today you're gonna have a little bit better uh insight into how to do that i'm guessing [Music] sorry i've had a little trouble hearing you my i guess my connection must not be that that good this summer around um karen i don't know if you can see on the screen but karen just uh entered in chat that she's uh run ads and upwork but didn't find any ideal candidates okay um don't ask don't don't give up karen so where do we start actually um i guess there's so much well first karen my question to you is what kind of job are you hiring for is it something long-term that is somebody that you need at your business uh there for full-time you know let's say a customer representative or something or are you looking for some someone that would be a short-term assignment let's say uh you know you need to do some data entry or uh some uh you know website maintenance what kind of job are you look uh what kind of person are you looking for well you know what while she's answering that greg you brought up a really good point i think a lot of people like me don't really know all of the different things that they could do like right now you just said um do some website update i i didn't know they could do that how would they i don't understand how would that even can you sort of run through some of the stuff that they do well sure like uh my web developer uh lives in jamaica and i don't actually i he's not long term but he's my go-to guy i hired him through upwork and he does an outstanding job um taking care of things that i just frankly don't you know want to have you know don't have time for but karen wants long term um long term i approach differently i've been on uh upwork or old desk for you know a decade and over that time i actually caught uh some i guess uh i noticed a pattern the people that work for me long term that's you know customer service more or less were the ones that the overachievers the ones that performed exceptionally well were the ones that had just joined up work that is they didn't have time to really accrue a lot of you know great reviews um while those that i hired that had a ton of great reviews i mean like this perfect resume of five star five star five star because then up work that you can rate you know rank the workers anyway those proved out to be you know somewhat mediocre and the the pattern occurred over and over again which i had to pay attention to so here's my advice to you if you're looking for long term first go after the workers that don't have a ton of good reviews uh or all right my mistake don't have a lot of reviews you want to find the ones that are new to work uh i kind of my guess is that those that are really good at what they do will not be on upwork for long they're going to be snatched up by a company and work their long term while those that are mediocre will actually just you know the company will stop working with them they'll go back to upwork and of course you know i know i do this you don't want to give anyone a bad review you want to be nice and you know give them leg up for the next job so those five star reviews my guess is that just business owners being nice um so first go after the folks that are new to upwork um let me give you one second i actually just wrote about this topic and um i have it right here my little strategy so i'm sure that all of you are familiar with work i love upwork because that's proven to be the you know the best platform out there for me um without work you can specify the criteria of who are you looking for and you know why first we didn't greg we didn't really talk about this i don't know if it's practical or not but i'll just throw this out there would it be useful if maybe you logged into upwork and shared a screen and kind of showed us a little bit about what we'd be looking looking at looking for yeah uh sure i'm gonna do this i don't know how i'm gonna do that but uh that is actually a really good idea you should have an icon down there in the tray as a share screen on my um computer it's like on a bar what's on the bar at the bottom same with your mic and camera control and leave studio okay here we go and let me try this here so share screen perfect all right so i should be seeing something on my side to bring it on stage i don't see it yet oh there you go bang all right there we are okay perfect yeah we got then we get over here okay here we go here we are so i logged into my upwork account for can you make that full yeah oh yeah of course all right so up works fantastic so up here let's say you want to find you know actually let me ask you uh what kind of karen what kind of uh position do you have or rather let me uh i think a customer service rep is probably the most often searched for a hustling company like what would a customer service rep do answer your phones or handle problems or what would they do well for emily's maids uh my second maid service jill does oh my god she does everything she takes care of the calls she takes care of ladies in the field troubleshoots issues um she pretty much takes care of the business for me um it's it's really nice i you know i guess i maybe i should be more involved but i'm hardly ever involved with emily's maids um so she does everything with dallas maids i have norma and norma is great she does customer service she helps ladies and gentle but she is there to help support my in office staff so uh she's there as a backup she's there uh to take care of any assignments that my office staff needs and she's there in case uh jill from emily's maids needs to take off or vacation or something or whatever normally can go in there and take the role of uh jaylen so norma's pretty much uh she does pretty much everything which is a huge help let me get back over here so this is my upper up to work screen here and first thing i do is up here i turn us oh yeah use only make sure that's all uh then i prefer to have only freelancers because you're hiring the individual you don't want to hire agency and have a middle person you want to have them work directly for you okay perfect i go for 10 below you can spend you can actually specify less in the actual job that you're you're posting online they have to be uh native and bilingual uh the other day when i was you know writing the blog post i was doing a search and i found uh oh i found the perfect um i would have hired her but i don't have any positions she's um she's from canada she lives in south america so you're getting like western talent perfect english for south american pricing i think it was uh that was a country she lived in but she would've been perfect so native and bilingual um for me you don't i don't know you don't need this but we do need somebody to speak spanish so you don't really worry about it oh yeah you just fill this in later okay yeah if you're looking for someone that hasn't done anything on here no earnings okay so that's the first step is who you're searching for and so here you have a list of candidates um you know raymark from costa rica my uh uh my va for emily's maid she's she's from costa rica and she was born and raised there but she sounds like the american girl next door either there's no accent whatsoever um and so here you have your pool of candidates now they don't have any reviews that's okay uh let's see let's pick the thicker or orianna sorry why'd you pick her how do you decide who to pick oh how are we right kind of my attention there for 15 hour um yeah that's why um all right she has it where you can she has some package uh prepackaged projects that you can hire for but you can come down here to employment history and not much employment history you know you're here you're there um when i see something like that i kind of pass uh you want you want stability let's check out raymark all right great uh he worked at a hotel five-star hotel customer service uh definitely has that experience yeah he's someone i might you know might look at four years at in customer service here and uh currently he's working at a hotel so he's employed so that would be a solid candidate um he's from the philippines but living in costa rica the philippines you know if you're looking for workers they have hard-working honest uh people that well they're actually kind of famous for that so philippines is a great place to hire the only caveat is that don't expect them to have well they don't really take the initiative but if you have a clear set of instructions a guide for them to follow they usually do a really good job so this is someone i'll definitely consider that's interesting that you said that they don't tend to take the initiative i would have thought just by the fact that they're on upwork that they would be the type of people that take initiative interest maybe that's true um you know uh well you've been doing it for a decade i'm guessing you know um well i've hired two workers from the philippines the one person who did my youtube videos um oh he did a great job and the second one actually she's worked for me now she's actually a quality assurance um person should listen to the calls make sure everything's taken care of make sure we're not missing anything um which by the way is is fantastic if you can hire somebody to listen to calls make sure nothing's missed and making sure that everybody is providing top service um you don't have to worry about missing appointments or you know missing things on the customer's to-do list she's been really huge help um but you know with her along with with everybody that works for me i try to have a very easy to understand operation manual or procedures so they can refer to it uh so they know what to do for the job and you know more importantly so they don't have to come to me all the time so but for me i think the best luck luck in in latin america okay do you see karen's comment here do you see karen's comment greg you're taking consideration how much money that made or how much money uh that they made they made yeah okay um like i said on upwork i want to find somebody who's new i want to find the good talent that hasn't been snatched up uh by you know another company and the way to do that is is not to look you know for those that have been out there for a while that have you know uh made some money on there the way it is just go after those who haven't been hired yet and i i think that's what you mean correct whether they have made money on on up work uh yeah sure still answer in a second what about she wants someone to take over the hiring process to start she wants them to screen do reference checks is that something that you have experienced hiring someone i'm sorry liz could you repeat that i didn't get that sure um karen is saying that she wants someone to take over the hiring process on screening reference checks and all that is that something you have experience with oh yes yes absolutely and norma does that for dallas maids and to have a va to take care of that takes up takes so much time off your plates because you want to interview as many applicants as you can you want to get as many calls as you can because in order to find the quality you gotta kind of sit through the quantity and to have a va take care of that is invaluable how we do it is we have a phone number where applicants can call in and they'll call in they'll get norma and we have questions that are all deal breakers but the most common deal breaker at the very top and the goal of the interview is pretty much to find any reason not to hire them so if you can imagine you know over after hundreds of phone calls we might get you know four or five good applicants that we might want to come in for an office interview so having somebody who can take that all that uh all those outcomes all those calls and pretty much just send us the ones that are already qualified really allows you to pick from the best so and so they just call norma phone or i mean oh yeah yeah no the phone number that we listen our ads are you know would be norma's direct phone number and so each my staff has their own line even the virtual uh staff you're using a voice over ip system and it looks like they're dialing a dallas number but it's routed to south america exactly so in this case mexico that's where we're coming from sorry greg what were you saying we both have a little bit of a lag greg um i was asking if there's ever any time zone so oh by the way this reminds me liz thank you for this lag when you hire a va make sure they have a very solid internet connection especially if you're doing voip you want phone calls to go directly to them and you want no interruption whatsoever no static you want them to look sound like they're like next door so making sure that they have solid internet is important and of course that's one of the reasons why you want to actually talk to them via skype before hiring them i usually talk to the top um my top three uh i always talk to my top three uh choices because i need hair you know how do they sound over the phone is there any you know internet connection good uh do they sound professional are they do they sound friendly but uh yeah there's one requirement make sure they have your own connection you are looking at their qualifications and their job history um are you do you just kind of take that at face value is there any way that you can verify any of that absolutely you can just simply call the company okay so you i wouldn't call the company i don't speak spanish but yes and so yeah you got to call references um i would say probably one of the biggest things that helps me is running a disk assessment uh the company that we use is fantastic they email a disk assessment and so with this assessment pretty much uh who you are as a person you know your personality what do you like what environment you work best in and after i have my top three candidates chosen the great thing about this company that i work with is that we will talk uh i'll talk with one of the reps who's able to analyze the personality test and that and let them know what job is they're able to determine which one would make the perfect fit and that makes a huge difference so yes check references that this is the assessment i love that uh and of course afterwards when you have this this assessment uh you can keep your your office so when you need to talk to an employee an employer an employee or a worker on a delicate topic you can read this assessment and figure out what's the best way to approach them um what's the best way to communicate with them in order to have a more constructive talk yeah you run any type of background chart i mean like an example what karen is looking for somebody to handle the hiring process i'm assuming that that person would have personal information on your job candidates like social security numbers and birth dates and those types of things um now we actually no we don't do background checks i i don't know how it'll start with that because you're working with people in other countries i so we haven't done background checks um okay i don't you know after you talk to them after you uh get their job history uh talk references do the disc assessments and get a good feel of who they are i haven't had any trouble at all okay so obviously obviously it's working i'm just thinking if they have access to that confidential information like in karen's case what uh what you know potential problems would you need to anticipate and what do we do to try to mitigate those so she wants to have them take over for the hiring process correct screen respects i don't see any problem with that i mean you find a you know a good worker who has a boy or a boyfriend or be able to talk on the phone and just they can easily take care of that for you i i don't uh right actually this would be the ideal job for a va i'm just thinking would you want to have a workflow where that va doesn't have access to like social security numbers and things like that good question um oh well in my hiring process you know they take care of the uh the initial calls the uh the first phone interview right which pretty much means most models and they don't have access to the to the to their personal information okay the very few that make it to an office interview comes to our office for in-person interview and my staff here will you know take that information through a uh our employment application so we'll set them down they'll you know they'll write out uh complete our employment application which you know requires that information and we'll do the interview so that's not outsourced and uh actually you're right that's not a good idea to outsource that anyway but you don't really need to i don't think um since options usually get that information in the office anyway i think like with my situation i use on people matter and they put that information in and then we can't access it after that i don't think i think we can just see like the last four of the social something like that so we might be i don't know that might make it a little bit easier but i can see so security has just really never been a concern of yours greg you've never really felt a need to worry about that aspect i'm sorry so you've never really felt the need to worry about that aspect of security it hasn't really ever come up or um no frankly i mean maybe i should but if they're here for an interview in office interview and yes they put that information um down what's the how would that get into the wrong hands um i guess is my question uh i i'm all for security and especially where security you know is definitely i i don't know what would motivate anyone to i don't know uh run in and and use those information for themselves i you know i don't think there's much of an issue there are there any special challenges in managing i guess would be you know a va be it you know and one paid over or halfway around the world i'm sure there's some challenges but you know what how do you manage somebody that that that's working in another part of the world are there any tools uh you know i t you know apps out there any any tricks there that that are helpful oh yeah of course i mean that's one of the reasons i love upwork is that the workers have to download software to their computer which monitors one how active they are on their computer and two provides periodic you know periodic uh screenshots of their screen so you can go in there and see how active they are and you know see what's on their screen so you know that you know they're not just chatting with your facebook apart gives you that oh yeah absolutely uh let me yeah if you like i can share my screen and get on show cool yeah i had no idea i've never heard anybody mention that before yeah and everybody i don't work for upwork i'm like telling them crazy okay anyway i'm just upworks is a great great uh platform so let's go here oh yeah pull it out yay so here's my jobs my people let's go to let's go to norma and the work diary is what you'll find most interesting so here are the screenshots the green indicates how you know how active they are uh but you know please note that you know if you're on the phone they may not be as active as you know as this would lend you to believe so with the customer service rep who's on the phone a lot expect don't expect this uh you know high green bar but if they're someone that works constantly on the computer like maybe your web guy then the activity will be higher so don't you know low grip you know one or two grains for normal is not anything to worry about let's go to let's see what this is oh she does payroll there you go here's your candidate karen oh yeah hey hey so you can check this computer which is very useful so that's interesting so when you hire somebody through upwork are you paying you pay up work and they pay the the overseas talent how do you pay your um yeah well her hours you say hourly you can set an hourly rate or you can set a flat rate but norm of course is only rate so uh she's at an hourly rate so let's say you know she works at nine dollars an hour at 10 hours that's nine dollars um but upwork does take a small cut of that from the contractor and from the business but if they're long-term the cut goes down so the cut you know the amount that upwork takes out of this you know out of what you pay at first is a little bit more but of course they recognize that long-term tenants you know they give you a deal so the great thing too is that upwork does it all i mean they take care of the payments they take care of the monitoring um they have a great platform for finding you know more workers i love upwork oh yeah liz so greg what i'm hearing is if it says nine dollars an hour i also am not paying any payroll taxes i'm not paying any additional fees just the nine dollars per hour is that correct no um outwork takes okay let's say i think it's is it 10 starting out i don't recall but let's say it's 10 so let's say i want to pay somebody five dollars an hour knowing that upwork will take ten percent of that i will you know probably up it you know ten percent to what 550 555 that way i can make sure they get they get paid so upwork takes the pay out of the workers uh paycheck um that's how upwork gets you know gets gets paid and frankly 10 or maybe it starts at 20 when you start um it's you know i thought about skipping up work and doing this by myself just work directly with the uh the contractor but um upwork makes makes it so easy and the tools are so useful you know that extra amount is well worth it and isn't that completely against their their policies i'm sure you can't just hire somebody off the platform can you i don't know um i suppose you could you know yeah i i think you could um i'd have that but i see no reason why not now if you go through an agency through upwork the agency will usually have a contract saying that you can't take their worker away but then again if you want a good va i would just hire directly okay what what are some of the things greg that you've had the most success with um hiring people to do i mean i hear you say customer service but is that they answer your phones when it rings when you say customer service what all is encompassed in that window in that umbrella well uh it really depends liz so for emily's i said you know jill pretty much does everything customer service taking care of ladies making sure that the right schedule um norma does customer service here along with payroll and uh some other things um things that i've hired for in the past like my web developers from jamaica my video editor is from the philippines my uh uh quality assurance persons from the philippines explain that what explain the quality assurance how are they doing quality assurance when they can't check any jobs oh the calls that we have are all recorded so they they they listen to all the call recordings for that day and they listen to call recordings making sure that all the staff is following my procedures making sure that we get the information that we get from the customer let's say a customer wants to do something um as a to-do list she makes sure that that's in the uh job so when they're printed out from ladies we don't miss anything uh so all the calls are recorded and that's how she does it you're making sure the sales team and the the other people who are talking and interacting with the client or doing what they're supposed to do as opposed to quality assurance of making sure that the cleaning team yeah okay not the cleaning quality yeah oh no no no um i'm talking about our customer service on the phone so you know there's she's caught some really big mistakes you know for example you know maybe somebody had the wrong date for the customer uh so she saved us so many times on so many human errors so it's been great but no quality assurance i'm talking about on the phones with my office staff as they work with our customers for for somebody who has never used a va before or upwork you know certainly this this this this idea going for overseas talent you know if you had to think of like one job or one activity that would be like a really easy place to start what we can what would that be where to start to define a a lot of times i mean it's everything from you know i need somebody to design a brochure i need somebody to do something on my website or you know i never have enough time to keep up with my social media make sure i'm posting enough on facebook and you know instagram and so forth is there anything just out there that cleaning businesses typically wrestle with that's really low hanging fruit that you know some things are i'm assuming are harder to outsource than others is there something it's just really not that hard to find people that are that have the skill set to do it and it's not terribly difficult to train them and get them to the point where they can be productive and in taking something off of off of our plate good question um good question there i mean you search upwork and there's so much talent um you know not only customer service you're looking at people that are you know can do great copywriting um you can look for people that can do web design i have a great guy who does our excel sheets you know when we need some fancy excel done to our uh excel sheets uh you know designs i wouldn't hire a designer i would probably go through 99 designs but we were talking about long-term uh employment when i look for somebody to do just like one job and let's say that job is you know very important um you know in addition let's say you can't uh i guess i'll have a lot of reviews but this is what i do i find i try to find three candidates to to do the job for example jeff who's my philip you know from philippines and did our youtube videos before i hired him i needed to make sure that i found good talent so i hired three uh video editors to do the same video um and i had simply picked the best one and jeff was by far the best one so i was able to see his work and see the product uh before i hired him for all the videos and so he did all my videos uh for youtube along with a bunch of other stuff on and off so that's actually another little trick that i use is hiring great people to do the same project see who's best hey liz what's up when you say you hire them to do your videos do you mean edit videos that you filmed or do they film the videos oh no uh for our youtube series when i was first doing our youtube series you know clean freaks um we did all the raw video but i needed somebody to edit the video to add little cool graphics and uh lettering and stuff like that just to kind of refine the product and yeah and i actually use that example my blog post uh the first two videos that i didn't pick were were cringe worthy but uh the work that jeff did was great but on upwork um you know you could find you can find so much talent um you know it's it's amazing you know i looking for a copywriter that they i came across you know some copywriters that had uh writers that had uh emmy nomination i'm thinking emmy nomination of course you're talking about 175 dollars an hour but you know checking their website and googling you know their name my goodness i could hire emmy-winning uh or not i mean nomination writer there so the talent's there and all kinds of talent so uh does that answer your question tom yes it does sounds like it's the kind of thing that you just kind of have to jump into the deep end and do it to figure it out well i would say uh long term like i said just go after the ones that just jumped on if they have a ton of great reviews avoid those because if they haven't been picked up by a company that's saying something and two of the short term projects like yeah and you can also hire three you know for a big project you can hire three to do a portion of that product the same portion so you can see who's the best and then there's your guy for then and out because it's the uh hiring three people for one job well worth it if you're gonna use it over and over again especially when it's so inexpensive anyway and you're just doing one small piece of the project i actually did that when i was looking to create a quick um graphic i i did that too i think you told me that when we were um in port collins and um hire three people and so i did and i think it was really smart and cheap it still was way cheaper even hiring three people um go ahead oh no go ahead liz i i was gonna ask if you've ever had a bad experience and and what what oh yes experience yes yes yes um good question oh by the way before i go you want good copywriting on your website hiring one writer uh well hiring three writers to do one portion that's the way to go with copywriting so you know who's a good writer so uh that's very important as for who you know bad experiences okay some countries culture um you want to avoid some countries because it's hard to find you know there's good people everywhere but sometimes it's hard to find um you know good talent among all the rip-rap um i would suggest for me frankly i try to stick with latin america because one it's our same time zone that means that you can communicate with them you know if you're in the philippines it's harder to communicate because the time difference so sticking with uh you know latin america great place to hire people um bad experiences well uh you know one country i won't name countries um i i could never find somebody that was honest um i've had you know for some reason you know people will lie about their resume will lie about their skills i have i had one person lie about their sex their gender i don't know why why they thought that was important but they lied about you know what gender they were and it's crazy so you you have to oh you have to do your homework that's you know of course one of the reasons why you call them um before you hire them you want to you know talk to them and get a sense of who they are and of course you can do that you know through skype or or whatnot so for me i've i've had luck in the philippines for computer work programming or whatnot eastern europe is a great place to find good quality talent um for me uh mexico i've found some really good hires through mexico [Music] central america not so much you know haven't had much luck in south america but where you look for where you look for the talents is is important i haven't had luck okay countries i've i have had luck in india china uh bangladesh nepal um i you know haven't had much uh luck there looking for workers okay but you like south america yeah mostly for the uh the same time zone because you want to be able to talk to them you you know you can hire customer service rep in philippines but that means they have to you know stay up night and sleep during the day and i know with me i just feel like i want to give whoever's working for me you know less stressed life life is possible i think would be stressful working at night so you know latin america has been been perfect for us but also of course a lot of my ladies speak spanish so you know that you know that helps too having them understand spanish if you want somebody to do compute you said like computer work like programming like website design some of the more intricate stuff where you're you're you know installing forms and lead capture stuff how do you how do you know if somebody really has the the talent the skill set to do that um i think that would be a little little trickier well going back to upwork you know i for long-term assignments you know i told you it's pretty much try not to hire folks with a lot of reviews go for the new ones because you want to find the you know the channel before it's you know taken uh work like you know web development or these are short-term projects like you know my excel guy he lives in thailand but he's from eastern europe um these short-term assignments that's when the reviews come in handy that's when you can look at reviews and see how well they do that's when you want to look at reviews so look at the reviews helps and as i said also if i have like a very important project that would be very expensive um you know with that i would hire three of the top people top three people i could find for one portion of that project and simply pick the one that performs best okay hey liz hey okay so these are the six points that i marked down greg that sound like they're pretty critical can you tell me if i'm missing anything i heard that really important solid internet connection like key gotta have a solid internet connection next one is make sure you call them first before you um take them on for a long term make sure that you've spoken with them by skype or something um the next thing i have is check references check their references and do your own duties yeah yeah okay um one thing i do when i when i consider them before i talk to them on the phone yeah i'll actually ask them to send me an audio file of them just tell me a little bit about themselves and that way i can listen to them and then i can hear their accents i can hear how professional they are i can get a good feel of who they are and that helps a lot that saves a lot of time for yourself oh yeah that's awesome yeah that's a i would have never thought of that in a million years oh that's great okay you could you could take it a step further i guess and ask them to like do a you know just record a video and send it to you right yeah i guess you could um for me for if it was a customer service rep all i care about is how they sound on the phone and fair enough yeah and i think they're probably less conscious about that too i've had them do you know video um but i think audio is just more easier for them okay and you know i i might find myself being a little bit biased if i had a video where i by audio there's nothing there to bias me i just either the accent is good or it is or so i i like that all right let me let me run through the rest of these um hire three people for a small piece if you're doing a large project sounds like that's critical hire a new person with very few reviews or no reviews that's like key right there um give them a disc assessment so that you know who they are how they how they work and how you can talk with them yeah that's that's for um yeah this assessment i only do for long-term employees that will be with me for a long time um you know for short-term projects not so much okay so i feel like this is like makes it seem a lot easier to me like okay there's not that many things that i have to do seven i thought it was six but now i know it's seven and then if i can just do these seven things chances are good that i'm going to have success and it's the top of the hour so if you haven't subscribed to cleaning business today really really easy just go to cleanitbusinessday.com email first name last name you'll get our newsletter have access to uh late breaking news in the industry um s bm resources small business moves resources all one word is the extension off of our website i'll drop the url and chat if you want to have access to all our uh downloads and other information that we've done smart business moves and i'm sure greg will be getting me a link to his blog post covering the discussion that we had today to build to his uh brother heavy inventory of backlinks to his uh website just send it to you cool so we'll get that up tonight i just want to make sure that we point out what rosemary said on here because that's exactly what greg was saying that though those good reviews don't necessarily mean that that they have great reviews that sometimes there's pressure there for them to get those so thank you for that rosemary yep nobody wants to give a bad review yeah it's true great as always you are a wealth of useful information and unique information we need unique information during this unprecedented time that we're dealing with oh good job tom good job more so now than ever [Music] you're amazing dude thank you tom and thanks so much having me you know come back on the show i hope i was useful and provided value for your viewers oh yeah absolutely great absolutely thanks so much you guys uh take care and we'll see you here tomorrow five o'clock eastern bye-bye bye y'all